Product Code Database
Magnus Duncan Linklater, CBE (born 21 February 1942) is a Scottish people journalist, writer, and former newspaper editor.
Since then he has continued as a regular contributor to The Times. From 1998 to 2007, he wrote a weekly column for The Scotsman's sister paper, Scotland on Sunday. Between 1994 and 1997 he presented the weekly discussion programme Eye to Eye on BBC Radio Scotland, and has written a number of books, including an account of the hoax autobiography of Howard Hughes, a life of Jeremy Thorpe, and an investigation of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. He has also written books on Scottish history and politics.
He was appointed as chairman of the Scottish Arts Council in 1996, holding the post for five years, and is currently chairman of the Little Sparta Trust, which maintains Little Sparta, the garden of the late Ian Hamilton Finlay, in the Pentland Hills. He is President of the Saltire Society, and former Chairman of Horsecross Arts Limited, which manages Perth Concert Hall and Perth Theatre. In December 2019, He resigned along with other board members following accusations of financial mismanagement of the service.
Linklater was a candidate for the position of Rector of the University of Aberdeen in 1999 and Rector of University of Edinburgh in the 2006 election, finishing second, behind Scottish Green Party politician Mark Ballard. His wife was Veronica Linklater, Baroness Linklater (d. 2022), a member of the House of Lords from 1997 to 2016; he is a Trustee of her family estate in Perthshire.
He was a trustee of The New School, Butterstone, an educational and therapeutic provision for children failed by mainstream education. The school was forced to close in November 2018 in controversial circumstances and a subsequent enquiry identified significant failings in both management and governance.
In the 2001 Teissier affair, in which Elizabeth Teissier was awarded a doctorate in sociology for a thesis defending astrology, Linklater succinctly summarised that "the core problem of the incident was that 'Teissier really believes in astrology. And there is the rub. If you seriously believe that the stars rule our lives, you have abandoned the most basic tenet of science which is knowledge obtained by observation and experiment.'" (Linklater, 2001, cited in Campion, 2016, pp. 90–91) Linklater was criticised for making Teissier into an "ontological criminal: what mattered for Teissier's academic qualification was not the quality of her work but her private beliefs" based on Linklater's alleged position that "the only source of knowledge can be science; the social sciences and humanities are automatically inferior explanatory models." The criticisms of Teissier's work, however, were not based on her astrological beliefs but on the poor quality of its scientific content and lack of legitimate sociology.
Linklater was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to the arts and media in Scotland.
|
|
