To students of history and the great conflicts of the last century, the American claims of having won both world wars, now voiced with Trumpian certainty, ring hollow. The properly educated realize that there is a fundamental difference between being the reason that a war was not lost and being the reason that it was won. But the American psyche, reflected in the parochial, self-congratulatory polemics of its secondary school systems, is steadfast and unerringly stupid. So, l

Sunday dinner has long been associated with home, hearth and family. It has become a symbol for a time when social values were arguably...

Penelope Billings Reed Doob Northrup Frye James Joyce Farley Mowat John Ronald Ruel Tolkien Robertson Davies

Whether to speak truthfully of the dead or give them the generous, and in your view inaccurate, benefit of the doubt? The solution is...

One of the greatest conundrums of being my age is that, as friends and family pass into whatever netherworld awaits, I am torn between...

The “better angels of our nature” famously appears in the final paragraph of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861. As Hank...

Never to be in this position again ...

One of the things that you spend a great deal of time doing as you get older is pondering; thinking of all manner of things that were...

Non-ideological, ‘ad hoc’, local action groups form around common interests or, quite often, around shared areas of discontent and...

I have just experienced a rather interesting phenomenon; I started this article with one very definite perspective but, in the process of...

It is dangerous to generalize too much; to identify universal truths from particular experiences. However, that is exactly what I intend...

I have an extensive collection of “themed” or “narrative” t-shirts, probably 40-50 such, and I’m sure that people find it strange for a...

My wife is one of those very unfortunate people who have had a long and intimate association with Ontario’s roster of medical...