A death greatly exaggerated

‘Canada,’ wrote the Toronto journalist Michael Valpy, ‘is the only country in the world where you can buy a book on federal-provincial relations at an airport.’ Things are looking up. Travellers eager to broaden their horizons can now curl up with this extended disquisition on globalisation by the consort of Canada’s outgoing Governor-General.

His Excellency John Ralston Saul, C.C., son of a Canadian army officer and his English war bride, is a man of parts. Novelist, essayist, historian, philosopher, he has been variously described as ‘an erudite Toronto gadfly’ and, in a delightful oxymoron by Camille Paglia, ‘the intellectual as man of the world’.

He got into hot water in 2002 by contending, in his In Equilibrium, that the West must assume some responsibility for the motivation behind the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This was deemed by some to be anti-American, and not the sort of thing the spouse of the Governor-General ought to be saying in public.