Construction began last week on a new Vancouver Art Gallery, much discussed but now apparently coming to fruition.

It is almost 100 years since a group of wealthy business types in the city announced they were offering $100,000 towards the creation of a civic art gallery. The person usually associated with this initiative is...

Wayne McCrory has won the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for his fascinating wildlife study, The Wild Horses of the Chilcotin, from Harbour Publishing. The Stuart-Stubbs Prize goes to the year's outstanding scholarly book on British Columbia.

Wild Horses is an artful combination of field work, academic...

Two things to draw your attention to.

First, a fine new book by and about the Squamish Nation. Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw: We Come From This Land describes the history and future of the Squamish, whose traditional territory includes Howe Sound and the shores of Burrard Inlet. One chapter, for example, tells the story of Senákw, a village site in False Creek with a complicated history of dispossession where the Squamish are now involved in a large, and controversial,...

Joe's Cafe is a landmark on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, not least because of an infamous political protest that broke out there in 1990. When the owner ejected two lesbian patrons for openly kissing on the premises, he touched off a boycott of the cafe by supporters of gay rights. The protest lasted several months until the owner apologized.

What brings this to mind is that the incident is included in a new online "digital storymap" about Vancouver produced by a group of history...

One Christmas present I very much appreciated was Jonathan Raban's last book, Father and Son.

I've admired Raban's writing for many years, ever since reading Coasting, his wonderful account of sailing around Great Britain in 1982, also a meditation on the damage that Margaret Thatcher was doing to his native country. When I read it I was in a sailboat myself, cruising through...