When a son reads his father’s work, how can he avoid the Charybdis of automatic rejection on the one had and Scylla of unquestioning acceptance on the other ? …

Straight Through the Heart

How the Liberals Abandoned the Just Society By Maude Barlow and Bruce Campbell

Guy Sprung ; Special to the Gazette

“We are tainted with flagellomania” wrote George Bernard Shaw (he coined the word), and though he was referring to England he could have been, according to Edward Anthony, author of The Rod and Staff, talking about the entire universe.

Human beings are animals. Western civilization has spent much of its cultural history trying to obfuscate this defining element of our makeup.

There is a major dearth in Canadian fiction of trivial novels that, with skimpy characterizations, risible dialogue, unmotivated action, implausible plot lines and a veneer of tasteful sexual titillation, try to glorify our country’s history.

Living as the thin edge of the heavy English wedge in French North America, angle Montrealers are all too aware of the impossibility of achieving perfection when translating from one language to another.

Open this book, claims Yevgeny Yevtushenko in his preface to Don't Die Before You're Dead. and "you open the soil of today Russia."

Douglas Rushkoff is a proud Generation Xer who dedicates his book Media Virus to his parents "for letting me watch as much TV as I wanted.”

Feeling bad was a way of life for Beckett, but there were reasons for it

A biography on Conrad Black draws a portrait of an invincible capitalist on an acquisitive rampage

View more Other Articles

Yeats has songs yo sing that speak to Quebec here and now

Ah, yes they don't make poets like they used to.

John Bentley Mays's memoir of his battle with depression is confessional literature at its finest

"L'homme c'est rien, l'oeuvre c'est tout, "wrote Flaubert. This maxim will be tested severely by Brecht & Co., John Fuegi's new biography of the left-wing German playwright and poet.

What is one to make of American writer William T. Vollmann? At 36 he has already published 10 books and more then 6,000 pages.

Gerald Lynch teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, is an award-winning short-story writer and has also published a critical study of Stephen Leacock.

Conor Cruise O'Brien is not exactly a household name in Quebec. Pity! This man of unimpeachable integrity, who has spent his life attempting to inject wisdom into linguistic, sectarian and nationalist struggles in his native Ireland, might have something to say to us.

The creek near the family farm with his tractor after every snowfall and stuffed an equipment box with second-hand gear, which the local kids used, first come, first served.

Herbert Whittaker, designer, director and for over 30 years a theatre critic, first at The Gazette and then at the Toronto Globe and Mail, is with reason considered one of the major observers

Will someone please nominate Reinventing Myself for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. Mavor Moore's remarkable autobiography chronicles the dizzying, quick changes in the first 50 years of his life during which Moore made an unparalleled and inimitable contribution to the postwar growth of the arts in Canada.

Canada Day has come and gone, leaving me once again catatonic and paralysed with that re-occurring lumbago of my anglo soul - an identity crisis.

In 1600, when Hamlet was, id not yet actually written or performed, at the very leas already a glint in the Bard's eye, there were three different words in common usage to connote the professional activity of performing a drama in front of an audience.

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried," is Winston Churchill's ofter quoted 1947 dictum.

Hockey is a pagan ritual we inhabitants of this norther clime have devised to help overcome the litany of tribulations called winter, which the gods inflict on one-third of our existence.

A book on love and eroticism that concludes by pondering God and the origins of the universe? Mexican writer Octavio Paz, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature, is a poet who dares to synthesize his erudite knowledge and philosophize on the big questions of our time.

Mixing autobiographical facts with fictional autobiography, Diana Atkinson's Highways and Dancehalls is a journal of a young woman's odyssey through the bars and strip joints of B.C. in search of herself.

If your puberty and the publication of the unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover fell, as mine did, hard on one another, then chances are you have, as I do, juicy passages from the book indelibly singed into your mind.