Conrad Black

Armed with his powerful intellect, his cattle-prod invective and the ornate prose that can make him sound like an incensed 18th-century pamphleteer, Conrad Black has from the beginning of his authorial career chosen subjects that have given him an advantageous platform for his conservative views. He established his bona fides as a historian in 1977 with Duplessis, a revisionist life of the mid-20th century Quebec premier. With that biography he also began his career as a combative iconoclast eager to blast away at the received wisdom of the Canadian intellectual establishment and the country’s political left. Later, using the same intellectual framework, he expanded his targets to include commentators and activists in the United States whom he pummelled for their misreading of two American presidents.

Black’s first book was designed to upend the then accepted...