Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today's wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men ….

All of us living in today's world are facing an enormous crisis - arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced - in the form of man-made global….

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is….

I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it..

How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and ….

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migra….

In Canada, the U.S. and most of Europe it may be easy to take political stands, this is something for which you can be forced to pay with your life, ….

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian..

I think one thing writers can do is point out that you don't have to say openly racist things, like [Donald] Trump, to be a racist or a xenophobe..

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism..

In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist of two hund….

Compared with how we've ducked it in the United States, Canada should be really proud of how you have welcomed a significant number of refugees - far….

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this t….

If your real wages are declining, your job is at risk, you fear your children will be worse off than you are, it's tempting to want to blame it all o….

Many of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain - the Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane ….

I can certainly sympathize with writers who don't want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk..

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War..

I think [George] Orwell is right. There are certainly moments when political differences appear minor, and someone can claim to be non-political or t….

Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about "welfare mothers" - a code phrase for people of colour..

The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country's injustices and contradictions down on paper. Ditt….

One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place….