The new biography by Evan Thomas gives us Nixon in the round, talented and tortured, ambitious and insecure
A 2015 biography by Evan Thomas gives us Nixon in the round, talented and tortured, ambitious and insecure In Being Nixon – a 2015 biography by Evan Thomas – erstwhile speechwriter William Safire is quoted as joking that “The boss has fallen in love again,” the reference being to Richard Nixon’s political infatuation with former…
But even if you’re talented and famous, life can be a bitch Memories from a sports-mad childhood were rekindled by the Wall Street Journal’s recent review of Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson. It brought back to mind not only Gibson but also that other female tennis great of the era, Maureen…
After the Trudeau-Chretien wing of the party turned on him, an offer of help came from an unlikely source – Brian Mulroney My previous column was prompted by Steve Paikin’s new book – John Turner: An Intimate Biography of Canada’s 17th Prime Minister. But there’s more to Turner than I was able to address in…
Chretien’s assessment? “He looks good until you put him on the ice.” Mulroney’s? “A great man and a victim of timing” On the occasion of John Turner’s death in September 2020, a column of mine earned a gentle rebuke from a regular reader. The problem wasn’t that I’d said anything factually inaccurate. Rather it was…
Bertrand Hébert and Pat Laprade’s book, The Eighth Wonder of the World: The True Story of André the Giant, helped unlock this Giant mystery
Professional wrestling has had many great performers with athletic prowess and an ability to engage – or, at times, enrage – audiences. Yet one pro wrestler was always in a class of his own: André René Roussimoff, better known as André the Giant. Inside the ring, André was a massive, near-invincible foe with seemingly unlimited…
Scott Eyman’s new biography of Cary Grant starts at the end. On Nov. 29, 1986, Grant – the personification of Hollywood’s Golden Age – died in Davenport, Iowa, just over seven weeks shy of his 83rd birthday. The death certificate ascribed his passing to a “massive intracerebral hemorrhage.” If Davenport seemed like an unusual place…
The Thatcher-Nelson Mandela relationship is a reflection of how very different people can evolve a respectful, albeit wary, understanding
Margaret Thatcher isn’t a name most people associate with the end of South African apartheid. But Thatcher biographer Charles Moore begs to differ. And he devotes a lengthy chapter in his third volume about the former British prime minister to making his case. As Moore tells it, Thatcher’s goal was to convince the white South…
Comedy masters Laurel and Hardy are the subject of a new biopic that tells a story of triumph and despair
Laurel and Hardy’s Hollywood heyday was before my time. I started going to the movies in the early 1950s, by which point their cinematic status had been eclipsed by other comedy duos like Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis. Still, the new biopic Stan & Ollie strikes nostalgically resonant notes. One of the more…
The inauspicious heir to the White House had planned to play poker the night Roosevelt died. Instead, he became president
Vice-President Harry Truman’s life changed on Thursday, April 12, 1945. That was the day Franklin D. Roosevelt died and Truman became the 33rd president of the United States. To virtually everyone, including himself, Truman was an inauspicious heir. Journalist A.J. Baime’s The Accidental President nicely captures the general bemusement. Born in small-town Missouri in 1884, there…
Is it feasible to separate political views and private behaviour from artistic merit? George Bernard Shaw is a perfect case study
To most Canadians, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) may be a quaint figure whose primary distinction is having a popular southern Ontario theatre festival named after him. However, he was a big wheel during the first half of the 20th century. A self-described “downstart,” Shaw was born into an impecunious Protestant Ascendancy family in Dublin, Ireland. Leaving…