“... In​ 2008, Donald MacKenzie expounded to LRB readers with admirable clarity the workings of Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate), which establishes the benchmark terms on which hundreds of trillions of dollars are lent and borrowed across the world every day.* It sometimes comes as a surprise to the uninitiated to learn that Libor has never been based on transactions which have actually taken place but on the interest rates at which the participating banks say they could borrow money if they chose ...”

“... conscience by promoting good causes at other people’s expense? In Statistics in Britain D.A. MacKenzie has harnessed this theory to explain the work of Francis Galton (1822-1911), Karl Pearson (1857-1936) and R.A. Fisher (1890-1962): ‘I argue that eugenics did not merely motivate their statistical work but affected its content.’ That one’s family ...”

“... Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam ...”

“... This, the London Interbank Offered Rate, was explained with pellucid clarity in these pages by Donald MacKenzie in 2008.2 Libor is the single most important number in international financial markets, used as a reference point throughout the global financial system. It is a range of interbank lending rates, set after consultation between the British ...”

“... is now less of a universal threat than it was between the 1950s and the 1980s. Some years back Donald MacKenzie argued in the LRB that – contrary to so many earlier previsions – nuclear weapons had been in effect ‘disinvented’ by the closure of the Cold War, and the colossal, escalating investment in both material and human resources needed to ...”

“... country in – well, let us say in the lifetime of its unlikeable editor, the 35-year-old Kelvin MacKenzie. This book invites comparisons between different ages of journalism, so perhaps, for old times’ sake, we could just recite again some morsels from the Sun’s coverage of a war in which more than a thousand people died. It was the paper that ...”

“... nowadays ‘are but the insignia of Clan Societies and Associations’. These include the Clan Donald. Helped by a seven-figure subsidy from the DuPont Corporation of America, it has restored part of the Gothic castle and stables at Armadale on Skye – built at the expense of Lord Macdonald in the 19th century – as a heritage centre: part shrine, part ...”

“... is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed at. Boyle’s American breakthrough ...”

“... Donald Trump​’s return as US president can’t match the shock of his ascent in 2016. But it does force a permanent change in historical perspective. In 2020, Joe Biden’s victory was treated by Trump’s domestic and international opponents as though it were deliverance from a bout of delirium. In 2024 it is Biden’s single term that looks like a Covid-induced interruption in the Trump era ...”

“... with churning desire. One double-click of a computer mouse, and you’re on Canada’s cascading Mackenzie River, or New Zealand’s winding Hope River, or the deep aquamarine pools of the Big Blackfoot River in Montana. The sensational locations vary, but the thrill remains the same. The piquant tension of the pick-up. (‘C’mon, baby.’) Then, the ...”

“... in the inevitable free drinks all round – but it wouldn’t do to overstress these Compton Mackenzie-style yarns, which seem to crop up variously at all points of Bunting’s life. The astonishing thing, rather, is that he performed at all: he worked, he was reliable, he was smart, he was respectful, ‘all the stupid military things’, as he put ...”

“... reader intelligence when – over social media – he broadcast gaps in his investigation into Donald Trump’s charities and got some of them filled in. This use of social media by journalists to appeal to the public for information – at the minor risk of revealing to rivals what the journalist is working on, what she knows and what she doesn’t ...”