Mark F. Proudman

Eric Margolis is a long- time reporter on the Islamic world, a columnist for the Toronto Sun and other popular tabloids, and one of the now-large cohort of anti-American polemicists. His latest book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?, is an extended diatribe against what he sees as American domination of the Islamic…

Gore Vidal once described Moby Dick as “a very bad masterpiece,” and most readers will understand exactly what he meant. Notwithstanding the book’s mythic grandeur, that huge chapter on “the whiteness of the whale,” for instance, has to be one of the most indigestible bits of fiction ever written. It was in the same spirit as Vidal’s observation that the LRC editorial staff planned this December’s holiday…

The H-Canada academic mailing list, a part of the well-known H-Net network, features the sort of messages that might be expected of such a list: conference announcements, job listings, enquiries as to the state of scholarship on gender in Manitoba and, periodically, excursive discussions of the state of Canadian studies. The latter revolve around the entwined themes of historical…

The recent flap over the separatist leanings of Michaëlle Jean and her husband, Jean-Daniel Lafond, obscures a more interesting fact about our country: we now elevate a certain kind of progressive public intellectual to positions of status and formal authority once reserved for British aristocrats and retired generals. Just as Lords Elgin and Alexander were representatives of the class structure of their…

The decline of historical narrative has been widely announced, sometimes with glee, probably more often with anger or regret. Jean-François Lyotard, one of those polysyllabic Parisians whom so many love to hate, has famously defined postmodernism as skepticism toward all guiding narratives, and that skepticism has informed much of the criticism of the kind of sweeping narratives of nations and civilizations that historians once…