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Annette Kellerman & Esther Williams
By Shane Maloney
Both were champion swimmers. Both made a splash in show business.
“My God, I wish I could meet her,” thought Esther Williams when she was shown a photograph of Annette Kellerman, the woman she was set to play in the 1952 MGM aqua-musical Million Dollar Mermaid.
Taken 30 years earlier, the photo showed Kellerman twirling a parasol as she walked a tightrope high above Santa Mo
 
Bob Menzies and Gamal Nasser
By Shane Maloney
Prime Minister Menzies did not think very highly of Egyptians. “These Gyppos are a dangerous lot of backward adolescents, full of self importance and ignorance,” he recorded in his diary. He was just the man, in short, to head a diplomatic mission to Cairo to negotiate with the Egyptian president, Gamal Nasser.
In 1956, Nasser, whose modernising regime had overthrown the playbo