Stuart Macintyre

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'Occasional Writings and Speeches' by Manning Clark

October 1980, no. 25 • 01 October 1980

In one of the pieces that make up this collection, Manning Clark recalls how he first encountered Barry Humphries in the late 1950s and recalls the shock of recognition that he was in the presence of a man of genius. Clark wants to defend that judgement against those of us who find today’s Edna Everage tedious and offensive. He identifies the great gifts of the satirist, the timing, the ear for ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'How to Write History That People Want to Read' by Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath, and 'Voice and Vision: A guide to writing history and other serious nonfiction' by Stephen J. Pyne

February 2010, no. 318 • 01 February 2010

‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in’, declared Jane Austen, and so too do a number of Australian publishers. It is a commonplace that historians do not know how to write, except to each other in ways that put other readers to sleep. The first advice to the author of any newly minted doctoral dissertation preparing a book proposal is to eliminate all reference to the thesis. The sta ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia' by Sheila Fitzpatrick

May 2021, no. 431 • 26 April 2021

As readers of her two volumes of memoirs will know, Sheila Fitzpatrick trained at the University of Melbourne until departing for Oxford in 1964 to pursue doctoral research on the history of the Soviet Union. That took her to Moscow, where she gained access to Soviet archives. Fitzpatrick would make her name as an archival historian, in contrast to earlier Western scholars who relied, both of nece ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'Not For Profit: Why democracy needs the humanities' by Martha C. Nussbaum

November 2010, no. 326 • 10 July 2020

What could be more timely than an argument for the humanities? They are poorly served in our schools and universities, and badly need champions. Martha Nussbaum, a distinguished philosopher at the University of Chicago, is well placed to affirm their importance. I read her book with eager anticipation and mounting disappointment. It employs a familiar device, proclaiming a dire crisis of educatio ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'Charles Perkins: A biography' by Peter Read

December 1990–January 1991, no. 127 • 01 December 1990

His minister described him as a permanent troubleshooter. And yet Charlie Perkins was surely the most trouble-prone and troublesome permanent head in Australian administrative history. Where other bureaucratics operated stealthily to preserve the outward appearance of responsible government, he engaged in calculated acts of public defiance and abuse of the governments he was meant to serve. They c ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews ‘Fractured Times: Culture and society in the twentieth century’ by Eric Hobsbawm

February 2014, no. 358 • 01 February 2014

As he approached his fiftieth birthday, Eric Hobsbawm finally won recognition. His Primitive Rebels (1959) was an innovative study of millenarian rural movements. In 1962 he published The Age of Revolution, the first of four books that encompassed the modern era with unrivalled powers of synthesis, and his volume on Labouring Men (1964) gathered up incisive essays on labour history that had appear ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'The Undivided Past: History Beyond our Differences' by David Cannadine

October 2013, no. 355 • 27 September 2013

David Cannadine is a distinguished transatlantic historian, the author of books on modern Britain and its empire, the biographer of G.M. Trevelyan and Andrew Mellon, and he recently wrote a perceptive account of the persistent anxiety over school history. An iconoclastic thinker and urbane stylist, Cannadine excels in the extended essay that overturns a conventional interpretation. These qualities ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'Australia and Appeasement: Imperial foreign policy and the origins of World War II' by Christopher Waters

March 2012, no. 339 • 01 March 2012

For long after World War II, particular opprobrium was reserved for the statesmen who failed to resist the belligerent dictators. Their failure was denounced in the popular tract Guilty Men, which appeared in 1940 soon after Hitler overran Western Europe, leaving Britain to fight on alone. These guilty men included the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who was forced to resign, the mandarins of ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'Heroes & Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Australian Labor Party' by Nick Dyrenfurth and 'A Little History of the Australian Labor Party' by Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno

September 2011, no. 334 • 23 August 2011

The heroes and villains in Nick Dyrenfurth’s account of the early Labor Party are the cartoon figures in the labour press that he uses to explore its political rhetoric. The heroes are sturdy working men, sometimes in bush garb, sometimes industrial labourers. The villains take various forms: serpents, harpies, bloodsucking insects, menacing aliens, but above all the Fat Man, the swollen, grotes ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism' edited by Silvio Pons and Robert Service, translated by Mark Epstein and Charles Townsend

March 2011, no. 329 • 01 March 2011

This mammoth book, first published in Italy in 2006, now appears in an English translation. It consists of some four hundred entries on communism as a world movement. The entries cover aspects of communist theory and practice, organisations and institutions, historical events, leading figures, and key concepts. They range in length from less than a thousand to four thousand words. ... (read more)