Paul Wilson

“These are true stories told from memory,” John le Carré writes in his introduction to this wide-ranging collection of personal anecdotes drawn from a lifetime of living and writing. But, he cautions, “was there ever such a thing as pure memory? I doubt it. Even when we convince ourselves that we’re being dispassionate, sticking to the bald facts with no self-serving decorations or…

This little book—short enough to be read at a single sitting, small enough to fit into one’s jacket pocket—has big ambitions. It is really three essays in one: a manifesto announcing an ecologically based view of Western Canadian history, a lament for a lost community and advice on how to resist the forces of “hyper-development,” the rapid urbanization of once cosy rural mountain…

In November 2004, The Globe and Mail’s then Moscow bureau chief, Mark MacKinnon, was in the thick of it as Ukraine experienced its remarkable Orange Revolution. After almost two months of massive demonstrations and a historic supreme court decision to rerun the contested presidential election, Viktor Yushchenko and his comely but fractious sidekick, Yulia…

In every human community the organization of power is the result of two opposed forces: beliefs on the one hand, practical necessities on the other. In consequence the leadership of political parties—like that of most present-day social groups: trade unions, associations, business firms, and so on—presents dual characteristics: it is democratic in appearance and oligarchic in …