In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

John McCrae In Flanders Fields

“You fail to overlook the crucial point.”

Samuel Goldwyn, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #2 Oct.-Nov. 2002

“This capacity to be fully engaged in the moment yet simultaneously aware of its historic or cultural context was a special trait…”

Electra Slonimsky Yourke’s “Foreword” in Nicolas Slonimsky Perfect Pitch

In a speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June (sorry, I’m a bit behind in my video editing) I argue that the calamities of the 20th century derived, fundamentally, from a rejection of the notion of truth.

“It is the curse of our epoch that the educated are uneducated, especially in the study of history – which is only the study of humanity. Their ignorance is less logical than the ignorance of the Dark Ages, because those ages filled the place of history with legends, which at least professed to deal with the first things, while we only fill it with news, which can only deal with the latest.”

G. K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News March 22, 1919, quoted in Gilbert Magazine April-May 2009

“It is a pleasant and consoling thought to think that our posterity will find sufficient entertainment in the contemplation of the enormous blunders that you are making at this moment. That will be a continuous source of laughter and joy to them.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Culture and the Coming Peril” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #5 (March-April 2005)

In my latest National Post column I celebrate Meghan Markle’s pregnancy as the sort of happy thing we need more of in the world, our lives and the newspapers.

“Such reactions [seeing only the enormous good or bad potential of a new technology] are amplified by what might be termed chronocentricity – the egotism that one’s own generation is posed on the very cusp of history. Today, we are repeatedly told that we are in the midst of a communications revolution. But the electric telegraph was, in many ways, far more disconcerting...”

Epilogue in Tom Standage The Victorian Internet