Ray Conlogue

Twenty-five years ago, Toronto writer Cary Fagan observed that people fleeing Toronto because of costly housing did so without regret because the city “has created no myth of itself to hold them.” Myths can be good or bad for many reasons. One very bad Toronto myth is that the city has no myths. John Sewell’s new political autobiography—as…

During the 1995 Quebec independence referendum a theatre company set up in a Montreal public square. There it re-enacted the 1837 war for Quebec independence as a series of encounters between Punch and Judy–style political hacks, with occasional heroic intervention by a rebel. I best remember the scene where Lord Durham opined that the defeated habitants were charming bumblers who might one day be…

For most Canadians, the Quebec student strike—picturesquely nicknamed the “printemps érable,” or “maple spring”—seemed to come out of nowhere this past May. About 300,000 college and university students, nearly three quarters of the province’s entire enrollment, struck against a tuition hike proposed by the Quebec government. Images of swathes of fetching young people, many displaying the carnivalesque painted faces and body language of attendees at a rock concert rather than a social…

These two volumes could bookend any collection of writings about the old right/left philosophical schism. In fact, they would have to be bookends, since proximity would cause spontaneous combustion. The flavour of Laura Penny’s More Money Than Brains is caught in its subtitle: Why School Sucks, College Is Crap and Idiots Think They’re Right…

We all know, or believe we know, the story of the children’s crusade. In the year 1212, many thousands of French and German children spontaneously set out on foot toward the Mediterranean, thence hoping to make their way to Jerusalem and evict the infidels from the Holy Land. Some may remember the event from parental readings of popular children’s stories such as Jerusalem and the Crusades…

Laurence Oliver once observed, apropos of Method actors who dig deep into personal experience for the motivation of their characters, that he had never been conscious of any motivation in his own work apart from the desire to show off. Christopher Plummer and William Shatner, casting aside Canadianness, set out to become show-offs of great…

For a student of historical fiction there is much in Peter Behrens’s The Law of Dreams, a novel of famine-era Ireland, to excite admiration. It offers delicacies for epicures of vanished sensory experiences, such as the observation that cartwheels not only grind on the cobbles, but also “snap,” presumably when the joint on their iron bands hits the…

Today the only certain thing that most people know about Mikhail Bakunin is that he was an anarchist. The only certain thing they know about anarchism is that it is opposed to all government. So defined, the subject does not seem a serious one. But look again. Bakunin during his lifetime was more popular than his contemporary Karl…