Search Results

“... events of the strike itself. ‘Insight’ is easily the more careful chronicler of these events. Donald Macintyre – at the time of the strike the Sunday Times’s Labour Editor, now the Times’s Labour Editor – is among the best reporters of the day, in his own or any other field. In the course of the miners’ strike he was paid the singular ...”

“... himself peculiarly bad at managing his own political career cannot alter the fact that he had, as Donald Macintyre makes clear, an instinctive grasp of the dynamics of the new media-led democracy, a skill certainly needed to pull off the Houdini-like feat of rescuing Labour from the state to which it had sunk in the early 1980s. But far more serious than ...”

“... are evident. Each contribution – the uniformly distinguished contributors include John Rawls, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, Ayer and Hampshire – is prefaced by a quite excellent editorial essay which makes available even to beginners work at the very frontiers of the discipline. But what this anthologising approach omits is also ...”

“... After The Road to Botany Bay, Australian history might as well be left to the historians. Stuart Macintyre, author of the fourth volume of the Oxford History of Australia, covers the years 1901-1942 in good plain style, with words like ‘bourgeois’ kept well in check and words like ‘spatial’ nowhere to be seen. Aiming to get at the truth, which is ...”

“... he introduced her to Fuchs. The story of Ursula Kuczynski – Agent Sonya – is perfect for Ben Macintyre, who specialises in ripping yarns of war and espionage, full of sympathy and comic irony, which read like thrillers yet thrive on fact. Soon after the Hampstead party, Fuchs was recruited by Soviet military intelligence, to which he passed notes about ...”

“... institutionalisation, became a haven for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything else. As Donald Davie pointed out some years ago, many of them didn’t like, or had no interest in, what they were supposed to teach and had to find something other than reading books to occupy their considerable supplies of energy and time. This is the result of a ...”

“... If this is a bleaker, more disenchanted book than Reading for the Plot, it is largely because of Donald Trump, even though the former president isn’t granted the dignity of a mention. It begins with a quotation from Game of Thrones: ‘There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.’ One ...”

“... where ‘My trousers grow used to the dung’, is not a Mandarin: What news from the frontier? Is Donald still Colonel? Are there more pupils than teachers in Scotland? I send you this by a small boy with a pointed head. Don’t trust him. He is a Campbell. Where earlier generations of Scottish readers had grown up with Crichton Smith’s more obviously ...”

“... English translation) are the great Latinist George Buchanan and the Gaelic poet Alexander Mac-Donald. Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s expansive 18th-century Gaelic poem on deer (echoes of which can be heard in Crichton Smith and Les Murray) is juxtaposed with John Davidson’s ‘A Runnable Stag’. This should have been the ...”

“... to penetrate average Australia’, dominated as it still is by racist mythologies. Stuart Macintyre, discussing the whole project, put it succinctly: ‘It’s not easy to do justice to the underdog in a volume with gold-blocked end-leaves.’The contradictions which cut between the printed substance and its packaging can also be traced, in a kind of ...”

“... But he never shows why such claims are necessary for Foucault’s specific projects. Even Donald Davidson, on whose views Norris relies extensively in arguing against relativism, insists that we cannot recognise a conceptual framework or tradition unless we are in broad agreement with most of its elements. Davidson’s view, therefore, explicitly ...”

“... of indigenous peoples displaced.’ Contemporary Australian historians, we are told by Stuart Macintyre, have recovered ‘a forgotten history of genocidal expropriation of Aboriginal Australians’. These are welcome contributions, yet neither writer can explain why these issues are so neglected in the earlier volumes. C.A. Bayly, the Vere Harmsworth ...”

“... by Descartes, Locke and Kant; it can only he ridiculed en bloc, as Russell ridiculed it. What Donald Meiklejohn once said about Dewey’s ethical theory is true of the whole of Dewey’s thought: you do not so much get convinced by any single argument as ‘go round and round in circles until you begin to feel at home’. You either gradually give up on ...”