In my latest National Post column I deplore Canada’s tendency to ignore national security threats including, most recently, an aggressive Russian submarine presence in the North Atlantic that menaces vital communications systems.

"If he’s mad, I hope he’ll bite some of my other generals."

King George II responding to criticism of General James Wolfe, quoted by John Ivison in National Post June 12, 2012

In my latest National Post column I warn that the largest lesson of the Christine Blasey Ford-Brett Kavanaugh confrontation could easily be seen as: Avoid the opposite sex entirely.

“It was this century [the last before Christ] that produced most of the famous Romans whose names are familiar to us: the two Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, and finally Augustus, all of whom helped in various ways to save Italy and the Empire from premature dissolution. It was, in fact, an age of great personalities, and one, too, in which personal character became as deeply interesting to the men of the time as it is even now to us.”

W. Warde Fowler, Rome.

In the latest issue of The Landowner I ridicule Britain’s Royal Academy for putting on a show of what Renaissance artists should have painted if they’d been smart, nice and sophisticated like us.

"for better and for worse, we do not erase. Only ideological dictatorships erase."

John Ralston Saul in the inaugural LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture, reprinted in Globe & Mail March 24, 2000

In my latest C2C Journal article I said the people tearing down statues of Sir John A. Macdonald have an even greater need to learn humility from history than the rest of us.

“One of the most eerie phenomena of our era, Eric Hobsbawm states in his masterful history Age of Extremes; The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, is the ‘destruction of the past.’ Most young people, he argues, now ‘grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.’”

Sean Mills in The Beaver April-May 2005