Ian Mckay: 5 books

The verb esperar means to wait. It also means to hope.—“The Past Was a Small Notebook, Much Scribbled-Upon”, Cora Siré Waiting, that most human of experiences, saturates all of our lives. We spend part of each day waiting—for birth, death, appointments, acceptance, forgiveness, redemption....

The popular conception of Nova Scotians as a pure simple idyllic people is false argues Ian McKay. In The Quest of the Folk he shows how the province's tourism industry and cultural producers manipulated and refashioned the cultural identity of the region and its people to project traditional folk values.

The year 2014 marked the hundredth anniversary of the start of the first world war. We should know how this came about. After centuries of Imperial rule, in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm 2nd fled into exile, in Holland. The Hohenzollern Empire was dead and it was a difficult thing for the German people to...

The story of the bloody 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge is, according to many of today’s tellings, a heroic founding moment for Canada. This noble, birth-of-a-nation narrative is regularly applied to the Great War in general. Yet this mythical tale is rather new. “Vimyism”— today’s official story...

The New British Politics is one of the most comprehensive and successful introductions to British politics ever published. Now available in a fully revised and updated fourth edition, this clear, lively and authoritative text has an emphasis on law and order and the historical context of British politics....