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...

In the November issue of the Literary Review of Canada, under the guise of revisiting Jack Granatstein's 1998 polemic, Who Killed Canadian History, Patrice Dutil writes a lament about the state of Canadian history today.

I didn't like Granatstein's book when it appeared 25 years ago and I don't much like Dutil's recycling of some of the same arguments. But instead of going on about it myself I...

Last week I was down to the regular meeting of the Vancouver Historical Society. The speaker was Jason Colby, professor of environmental history at the University of Victoria.

Jason was talking about his book Orca: How We Came to Know and...

Another year has rolled around and once again The British Columbia Review is in the middle of its fundraising drive.

You know the Review, BC's best on-line book review site (and I don't say that just because I am a member of the editorial board). If you care about books and the conversation about books then why not consider helping out?

The Review's estimable man-in-charge, Richard Mackie,...