Martin Laflamme

The People’s Republic of China has an image problem. Skim the world’s headlines for the last few years, and you may well be overwhelmed with reports of the regime’s aggressive diplomacy, its interference in the domestic affairs of other nations, its use of arbitrary detention to achieve political goals, or its abuse of human rights in…

The man was a complete stranger. As if out of nowhere, he lined up behind the young woman at the downtown currency exchange office. He seemed friendly enough and was soon peppering her with questions about her upcoming trip: a visit to Moscow in December 2003. Their banter, innocent on the surface, continued for a…

It was a disaster. At the very least, it was turning into a highly embarrassing professional failure. By the late 1990s, close to a decade after Frank Gehry had been given the commission to build the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the project that would transform the downtown core of the city and become one of the new century’s most iconic constructions was in serious…

Paul-Émile Borduas was anything but a quitter. Like all good artists, he constantly tried to push the boundaries, and when he hit a dead end, he looked for a different way forward. Forebears like Renoir, Degas and Manet, he later wrote, had closed “the cycle of naturalism.” Soon afterwards, he felt, the Cubists had slammed the doors of individual expression…

Norman Bethune spent less than two years in northern China, but during that time he worked feverishly. When he was not at the front, directly providing for the injured, he devoted much of his time and energy trying to transform peasant boys into medical assistants. He did not rest when things quieted down. At the very…