Fall 2007

Six years ago, I began work on an unauthorized biography of Conrad Black. I didn't know I was destined to become a rodeo star. Writing Robber Baron in English (for ECW Press of Toronto) and Le baron Black in French (for Editions de l'Homme of Montreal) – both of which are coming out this fall – has turned me into something of a bronco rider.

Of course, at the end of 2001, Black was on top of the world. Rich, famous, influential, controversial, ferociously right-wing, his introduction into the British House of Lords struck me as weird – especially since it had come after two years of surrealistic legal wrangles with Jean Chretien and the federal government.

Copyright is so entrenched in popular thinking about the production and dissemination of culture that we may think of it as natural or inevitable. We may even drape it with mystical ideas about the creative process. To be sure, authors and artists have always had a special connection to their work. The seventeenth-century poet John Milton wrote that books "preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." An anonymous author declared to the British Parliament in 1735, "If there be such a Thing as Property upon Earth, an Author has it in his Work."¹

A key difficulty in constructing the city’s metaphors is the handling of meaning from one generation to the next, or across barriers of birth, class and circumstance. For a large part of its history, Toronto has been in a state of near-amnesia, seeking desperately for its own memory. (Warkentin 2005)

The past was the secret and mysterious city, the city within the city, the city of the alleyways and swimming pools and the city of the lakeshore. And the lake, which cared nothing for time, would often cast up strange relics of the future, as well as the past, upon its shores. (MacEwen 1985: 81)