Benjamin Errett

You can learn something very specific about someone by the drink they don’t order. If there’s a spirit they avoid as they scan the cocktail menu, it’s a good bet that it was their first big alcoholic mistake. An early dalliance with gin, for instance, may well keep martinis potato-based for the rest of one’s…

There’s never been a writer like Samuel Marchbanks, mainly because there never was a Samuel Marchbanks. The self-proclaimed Philosopher of Skunk’s Misery, head of a one-man splinter party, and mid-century diarist in the Peterborough Examiner was also a pseudonym of Robertson Davies. Not his alter ego — a term that “suggests some dreadful non-cholesterol cooking substance,” Marchbanks insisted — but rather his…