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Reviewers praised Neil Price's Children of the Ash for "rescu[ing] Viking history from the grasp of white supremacists ... not by asserting any sort of moral superiority for the Vikings ... but by restoring their rich and strange particularity." Even so, most reviewers missed the key bit of information about the Norse: that they were ultimately converted by Benedictine monks from England and went on to adorn Christendom in its most flourishing age — and that the Scandinavian countries continue (and not by accident) to be on the whole among the most civilized places in the world to live. Read on for the context:     Updated...

Autonomous signals intelligence has put Canada at the heart of Five Eyes sharing — writes Maria A. Robson   CANADA FOUNDED ITS first intelligence agency, the Communications Branch of the National Research Council, in 1946. The word “Security” was added in 1973 and since 1975 it has been known as the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). In the nationalist mood following the Second World War, some policymakers assumed that the development of autonomous signals intelligence would allow the country to go its own way and assert independence from Great Britain. As it happened, this expectation fit nicely into a colony-to-nation narrative. However, declassified...

DR readers will have seen poems and prose by Fraser Sutherland in our pages over the past couple of years. He attended our Toronto event in 2019. His review of a tribute to Al Purdy at 100, published in our Autumn/Winter 2020 edition, is reproduced here. As far as we know it was his last published work of prose, though some posthumous works may, we hope, follow. So far there is also this brief notice.  

Fraser Sutherland remembers Al Purdy   An Echo in the Mountains: Al Purdy after a Century. Edited by Nicholas Bradley. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020.   ONCE I WAS GIVEN the thankless task of introducing Al Purdy to a room full of university undergraduates. I didn’t commit the folly of saying “Al Purdy needs no introduction” but I did say “Al Purdy is a great friend of young poets.” Purdy wasn’t going to let me get away with that. He snarled or bellowed (in his case they were often interchangeable), “I hate young poets!” He didn’t hate young poets; he was only seizing...