Ian McDonald

In any given situation we assume that people, including ourselves, will act sensibly.

One of the worst aspects of the self-righteous is that those most guilty of it most vociferously deny that they are guilty at all.

It is tragic to see a great nation bringing itself to its knees.

In a vibrant democracy elections should be a cause for celebration, an ever welcome occasion regularly marking the successful outcome of what in any country’s history has always been a long struggle to overcome authoritarian, and often brutal, rule.

In a long life I have on a number of occasions been asked to address various groups graduating from school or university or making the transition from one stage of life to another – for instance, new recruits in a company or first-time members of a national sports team.

I find it difficult to convince friends – or anyone – that poetry is worth reading.

My tutor at Cambridge, Professor Nick Hammond, authority on the history of ancient Macedonia and on the life of Alexander the Great, used to coach me on what he called “exercises of the mind.”

There are few problems in Guyana which are more intractable than the problem of bureaucracy in all its deadly guises.

In a recent column I mentioned Nick Hammond who was my tutor at Cambridge.

These days, as increasing age makes the discovery of new lands much less likely, it remains perfectly possible to voyage in the mind as adventurously as ever by reading books and talking to good friends.

Winston Churchill, exasperated by opposition politicians constantly questioning his policies and his own credentials and frustrated by having to consult and compromise on measures which in his judgement were straightforward and ripe for introduction without hesitation, once exploded: “Democracy is the worst kind of government!”

There is a book of great beauty given to me as a Christmas gift by my wife: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Fitzroy Maclean published first in 1976.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, who as a young foreman in a Philadelphia steelworks in 1880 started measuring work performance compared with time taken to do the work, was the first time and motion study expert, the man who pioneered the science of efficiency in management. 

These are not my own insights but I make them my own and am pleased to pass them on.

Isaiah Berlin was in my view the most distinguished political philosopher and historian of ideas of the 20th century.

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, whose marvellous collection of essays The Redress of Poetry I like to re-read, writes that W H Auden’s elegy for Yeats was “a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit.”

Amidst my most surprising possessions are 66 letters from Don Bradman.

One of the most serious aspects of life today is the widening gap between talk and action.

It is hard to claim that GuySuCo’s losses on the scale now obtaining – leading to the diversion of precious taxpayer’s revenue from education and health for instance – can be sustained much longer.

In Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon, writing about the reign of Titus Pius, commented in passing that history was “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”