Yesterday’s News

George McCullagh walks out of archival obscurity and into modern consciousness on the dusty back roads of 1920s Ontario, where we first see him in Mark Bourrie’s remarkable — and long overdue — biography of one of the most consequential and least remembered Canadians of the past century. We catch an evocative glimpse of him as a young travelling subscription seller for the Toronto Globe, striding purposefully across the country byways, talking up the farmers, trying to cajole them into signing on for a publication that wasn’t as good or as interesting or as financially healthy as the Montreal Star. All this — at a formative time for McCullagh and for Canada — plays out in history’s rear-view mirror, so distant that there hardly breathes a soul who remembers how robust and how important the old Montreal Star was or, really, how important even a dull and dutiful paper like the old Globe could be in the life of its readers, scattered as many of them...