But he insists that the blame for the tube strike that brought London to a halt lies squarely in others' hands: "intransigent management" is at fault, as well as Boris Johnson for a "belligerent approach".
Former moderates have been driven into the hands of increasingly intransigent separatists, detractors say.
The future of the Philharmonic, that great and intransigent institution, is in the hands of others.
A formal treaty was precluded because it would hand a veto to the intransigent legislators of Capitol Hill, while also offending the sensibilities of Delhi and Beijing.
But the intransigent grandeur of a Wölfli calls everybody's hand.
It's long been put about that the US president's hands have been tied by an intransigent US Congress hostile to any notion of detainees labelled as "terrorists" being released from Guantánamo.
The nationalists, on the other hand, said that Smith was being deliberately intransigent and that they did not believe he was sincere in seeking an agreement if he was so adamant about not giving such a "very small thing", in Muzorewa's words, as diplomatic immunity.
Gradually the task of defending the Protestant cause fell into the hands of Lutherans, less militant and less intransigent than the Calvinists; and the Lutherans were prepared to ally, if necessary, with Anglican England, Catholic France, and even Orthodox Russia in order to create a coalition capable of defeating the Habsburgs.
Intransigent commanders have ignored demands to appoint provincial officials and hand over customs taxes, and a lack of financing and security has imperiled the electoral registration process, the delegates found.
The sorry end to Maazel's artistic and general directorship of the Vienna State Opera, a four-year contract which he had undertaken with such buoyant optimism in 1982, but which was curtailed in 1984, was on the other hand not his fault: the city's notoriously intransigent musicians had already conflicted with more amenable figures.
For one thing the Germans were even more intransigent than anyone could have expected; and on its side Syriza overplayed its hand.
