It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump..

No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system. Or for a society at piece..

Speaking of Germany in 1933, I don't think you can remove yourself from politics when, in so many countries - the United States, Poland, Hungary, and….

You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east. Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year,….

Some 2,800 Americans went to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], and it was, by far, the largest number of Americans before or since who've ever jo….

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the huma….

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

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..

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

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….

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

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….

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 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….

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

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, ….

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 ….

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….

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..