Foreword

I t is not an easy task to write an introduction to a volume that celebrates the life and career of John English.One of Canada's pre-eminent political historians over the past half-century, English also wrote extensively on international afairs, while engaging in politics both at the front of the parliamentary stage and in the backrooms where politics is really concocted.English is of course a Canadian Liberal, and the Canadian Liberal party is one of the longest-lived political formations on the planet.Te Liberal party was and is an omnibus formulation, embodying a rich variety of self-contradiction, and it is appropriate that a broad-minded and tolerant man like English should fnd a lifelong home in a party ofen and justly compared to a broad church, drawing its strength and longevity from its incoherence.While a party man, English has always reached "across the aisle, " as the Americans say, in writing and teaching, and in politics.He brought his political experience, but not his partisanship, into teaching and writing.Tough a Canadian nationalist, he is simultaneously an internationalist, which favours his work with realism and, ofen, pessimism.He even engaged in diplomacy himself at the end of the 1990s and could ruefully agree with Malcolm Muggeridge's characterization of a British diplomat as "forever Jeeves, to an increasingly demented Bertie Wooster."Jeeves cast an ironic eye on the world, as English does -on academia, on politics, on the waves of political and intellectual hysteria that engaged many of his colleagues over a long professional lifetime.He followed in his vii

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