Daniel Woolf

The Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle once declared, “No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, believed that biography — having one’s peccadilloes and failings encased in amber —“lends to death a new terror.” More recently, the American novelist Thomas McGuane suggested that any future chronicler of his life ignore him altogether and concentrate on his…

Half a century ago, the historian Carl Berger published The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914. This was a remarkably fascinating foray into a rather fallow field, Canadian intellectual history. Since then, the field has become far more fertile, with more Canadianists identifying as intellectual historians and with more Canadian scholarship showing an awareness of the European…