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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 ‘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)
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