Search Results

“... Cuckoo clocks,’ said the President. Orson Welles on the Prater Wheel slipped in and out of my mind. ‘Cuckoo clocks: the one area where the Swiss haven’t run us out of business.’ Last year I was made cochair of a government-university colloquium on the future of industry and society in Baden-Württemberg, Europe’s most prosperous region, but one perilously dependent on the building of cars ...”

“... A few years back I was having lunch in Soho with a London publisher, trying tactfully to find out why a book of mine – about Scotland – cost so much and never seemed available in Scottish bookshops. I cited an Edinburgh firm whose handsomely-produced list seemed ubiquitous in the north and also quite affordable. ‘Ah,’ said my host, ‘but X is only worried about where his next Chinese carry-out is coming from,’ We cultivate literature on a little Egg Foo Yong? It seems we do ...”

“... You don’t hate us in Scotland, Master?’ said Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Teuto-Gaelic classicist, to Jowett of Balliol. ‘We never think of you at all,’ came the lapidary reply. Drafting a sketch for a BBC radio programme on devolution, I was rung by Professor Phil Williams, a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy ...”

“... futuristic. It was, in Alvarez’s phrase, ‘outer space with bad weather’. This is the story Christopher Harvie has to tell. His is an immensely important book – astonishingly, there is no other good account in print of the North Sea phenomenon which has changed the world oil market, transformed the British and Norwegian economies ...”

“... dithering photo of the prime minister fronts What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown? The cover of Christopher Harvie’s book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew ...”

“... on the labour Government in 1979, which Callaghan called ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’. Christopher Harvie’s book, a miscellaneous collection of essays and journalism, pursues an interesting theme in the comparison of British government with the much more dispersed structure of West Germany. Its value is the recognition of how 13 years of the ...”

“... lived he would probably have resigned in the midst of the franchise reform crisis of 1884, and Harvie seems to share Mrs Fawcett’s view that in 1886 he would have split with Gladstone by declaring against Home Rule for Ireland. Goldman’s book originated in a conference at Fawcett’s old Cambridge college in 1984. After a well-balanced and informative ...”

“... to return to it,’ Neal Ascherson wrote in the Scottish political review Q in 1975. The historian Christopher Harvie described the emigrant intellectuals who pepper Scottish history as ‘red Scots’: ‘cosmopolitan, self-avowedly “enlightened” and, given a chance, authoritarian, expanding into and exploiting greater and more bountiful fields than ...”

“... Just seventy years after Friday, 31 January 1919, when troops and tanks stood by to quell a mass rally, in Glasgow’s George Square, of West of Scotland workers campaigning for a forty-hour week, the event was remembered in the People’s Palace, the museum of labour history on Glasgow Green. A bronze bust of Willie Gallacher by Ian Walters was not so much unveiled as proclaimed ...”

“... serious but highly readable, were reappearing as Ash wrote: Rosalind Mitchison, T.C. Smout and Christopher Harvie were among the most successful authors. They wrote mostly narrative or social history, revealing unknown territory to generations who had learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more ...”

“... regard Marxist historiography as a menace. Professor J.H. Hexter’s recent ad hominem assault on Christopher Hill’s scholarly integrity seems to reveal the same crusading zeal on the other side of the Atlantic. Furthermore, in a cunning jest of History, some Marxist philosophers have latterly enlisted in the armies of the Right in denying Lebensraum to ...”