Ian Mcintyre

The gung-ho photo on the dust jacket — battle fatigues, the red beret of the Paras, eyes narrowed to determined slits — suggests a touch of the Paddy Ashdowns. But that is at odds with the picture of the author that emerges from this his first book: ‘For my part, I do not think I have been in action in the broadest sense for more than about six of my 37 years of commissioned service.’ Yet as military careers go in an age of peace-keeping and humanitarian intervention, General Sir Rupert Smith’s has not been exactly uneventful.

‘Canada,’ wrote the Toronto journalist Michael Valpy, ‘is the only country in the world where you can buy a book on federal-provincial relations at an airport.’ Things are looking up. Travellers eager to broaden their horizons can now curl up with this extended disquisition on globalisation by the consort of Canada’s outgoing Governor-General. His Excellency John Ralston Saul, C.C., son of a Canadian army officer and his English war bride, is a man of parts. Novelist, essayist, historian, philosopher, he has been variously described as ‘an erudite Toronto gadfly’ and, in a delightful oxymoron by Camille Paglia, ‘the intellectual as man of the world’.