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From the archives

When Terror Came to Canada

The response to the FLQ crisis remains controversial five decades later

A Neglected Pledge

Moving beyond apologies

The Nobel of Numbers

How a Hamilton native played mathematical peacemaker after World War One

Robert McGill

Robert McGill is a novelist and an English professor at the University of Toronto.

Articles by
Robert McGill

Body Language

This novel of a type July | August 2022
In my youth, I called myself a writer, but my first passion was distance running. I aspired to shocking feats of physical endurance, nurtured fantasies of heroism. (Probably I read too many comic books.) But at twenty-three, my dreams were burst by a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. Suddenly I needed insulin injections each time I…

Fascinating Boredom

Exploring the banality of affluence and the tedium of the raconteur January–February 2013
If some people spend their lives terrified of being bored, why are the distractions they seek out often tedious? This question is raised so provocatively by John Ralston Saul in Dark Diversions: A Traveller’s Tale that to call the book a study in boredom is not to condemn it but to identify its most interesting subject…