Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Stuart Macintyre

Stuart Macintyre

Stuart Macintyre (1947–2021) was an award-winning academic and popular historian. Born and educated in Melbourne, he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge before returning to Australia in 1979. Throughout a long and distinguished career, Stuart authored many award-winning monographs and references titles, including The Oxford History Australian History, Volume 4 (1986), The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality (1999) and with Anna Clark, The History Wars (2003).

Stuart Macintyre reviews ‘To Exercise Our Talents: The democratization of writing in Britain’ by Christopher Hilliard

September 2006, no. 284 01 September 2006
Once the prerogative of connoisseurs and bibliographers, the study of the book has become an increasingly popular field of cultural history. Earlier scholarship was concerned with rare and variant editions of canonical texts; recent work is more inclusive, comprehending a wide range of popular and ephemeral literature that extended the reach of print. Attention has turned from production to consum ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'Australia’s Empire' by Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward

October 2008, no. 305 01 October 2008
One of the more successful ventures of Oxford University Press in the closing decades of the last century was a five-volume History of the British Empire. With more than a hundred contributors, this was a major undertaking, but its beginnings were not auspicious. Roger Louis, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, was appointed editor-in-chief. That drew a public complaint from Max Beloff ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews ‘Manning Clark: A life’ by Brian Matthews

November 2008, no. 306 01 November 2008
This life begins with a ritual its subject practised through the 1960s and 1970s. Manning Clark would visit St Christopher’s Cathedral, Canberra, kneel before its shrine of the Virgin, ask assistance in fighting his need for alcohol, and beg forgiveness and peace. While Clark’s funeral was a requiem mass at St Christopher’s, and a preoccupation with the Catholic faith became increasingly evi ... (read more)

Stuart Macintyre reviews 'Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia' edited by Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard

November 2009, no. 316 01 November 2009
In the closing years of the twentieth century, historians combined to produce large reference volumes of national history. Some were stimulated by anniversaries, notably the dictionary, atlas, gazetteer and chronology, guide to sources and compilation of statistics that were published by Fairfax, Syme and Weldon for the Bicentenary. Some were initiated by publishers, such as the Companion to Austr ... (read more)

'Hope was in the air – a year in America' by Stuart Macintyre

December 2008–January 2009, no. 307 01 December 2008
For the second half of 2007 and the first half of 2008, I was the professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. This is an annual appointment, open across the range of disciplines that lend themselves to the study of Australia, so that my predecessor, Jim Fox, was a member of the department of anthropology, and my successor, Iain Davidson, is now working in the department of archaeology. ... (read more)

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)
Page 1 of 2