Memories and memoirs are two very different species. The latter are usually like leisurely train trips through concerns, ideas and causes that define the author’s life, career and worldview. They can on occasion suffer from a touch of self-importance. Michael Decter’s Tales from the Back Room: Memories of a Political Insider is more like a whirlwind helicopter tour that drops in on different times, events and people. “Stories are as important to politics as facts are to science,” he notes with characteristic conciseness in his introduction. “In the end, politics must be entertaining just as life must be entertaining or who could bear either?”
His velocity and flight path are not burdened by self-importance, but by a traveller’s delight at discovery and nuance during different epochs of a life that has included roles as deputy minister, cabinet secretary (in not one but two...
Hugh Segal was a political strategist, senator from Ontario, and principal of Massey College. He wrote the author of The Right Balance: Canada’s Conservative Tradition, among other books.
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