The Globe and Mail - Rex Murphy Columns

When art becomes agitprop

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00 EDT

There is a difference between art, which is alive to nuances of character and circumstance, to the moral complexity of being, and agitprop, in which the purpose and outcome are already known to the artist, predetermined. Caryl Churchill's controversial playlet, Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, now getting readings and attention in Canada, is, in my judgment, clearly in the latter camp. And here's why.

Tories attack: bad manners, bad politics

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00 EDT

Commentator with The National and host of CBC Radio's Cross-Country Checkup''Is that Michael Ignatieff on the cover of the British GQ, the upscale version of its more gamy American counterpart?''

Tories attack: bad manners, bad politics

Fri, 15 May 2009 23:08 EDT

These ads will hurt the Conservatives far more than they will the Liberals

A distasteful display of agitprop

Fri, 15 May 2009 18:07 EDT

Rex Murphy on the controversial play Seven Jewish Children

Fickle Gods of Global Warming

Sat, 9 May 2009 00:00 EDT

The carbon-spewing wolf shall lie down with the global-warming lamb, or something like that

Obama's audacious ambition

Sat, 2 May 2009 00:00 EDT

Commentator with The National and host of CBC Radio's Cross-Country CheckupWhat do we know after the first century (of days) of Barack Obama?We know that he is the one of the most ambitious men to enter the White House. With most who achieved the office, the presidency itself was the capstone, the end peak, of their ambition. They governed, reacted to crises, and retired from the scene - either to write the inevitable ''my case'' memoirs, or to parlay their days in office (Bill Clinton) into a celebrity industry fuelling their arrival on the lush slopes of plutocracy.

Obama's audacious ambition

Fri, 1 May 2009 23:16 EDT

The President has extended his financial 'permission' to the overhaul of medical care, education, energy policy and business

Keeping it in the Tory family

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:00 EDT

There was a gracelessness to Harper's attempt to shunt Mulroney aside

Keeping it in the Tory family

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:00 EDT

Commentator with The National and host of CBC Radio's Cross-Country CheckupThe Karlheinz Schreiber-Airbus-Brian Mulroney saga rolls through another of its near endless permutations. Were there a present-day Charles Dickens, he would have a modern version of Bleak House, the great fable of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the interminable Chancery suit around which the original and indefatigable Dickens wound his greatest novel.