What happened was that over the weekend I caught a cold. They hit me pretty hard these days, so I was still a wreck on Monday and I wasn’t able to finish a new podcast episode. Quick, Producer Kevin! To the deus ex machina!
Fortunately the audience for The Paul Wells Show has grown so quickly in its third season that it’s now several times as large as in the first season. The stats suggests that most of you don’t go back through the archive to see what you’ve missed. Which means this particular greatest hit from the archives will be new to many of you.
At the beginning of 2023 I spent four nights at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, interviewing assorted luminaries. The biggest crowd was for Margaret MacMillan. We had a great conversation.
It was almost the first anniversary of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Getting time for second thoughts, if one were so inclined. MacMillan was not so inclined. She put the moment into a longer perspective, with references to the tsars, Napoleon and others. She gave her sense of how Brexit has gone, now that it was fact and not hypothesis. She was the recent recipient of a high Commonwealth honour, chosen by the Queen, delivered by the then-new King. This episode was an excellent generator of anecdotes. I’m from modern Ottawa, where everyone thinks communication is about message. MacMillan serves a reminder that it’s about talking and listening.
Once I realized the vault was going to save me this week, I selected three candidate episodes and invited readers to vote for their preference in a subscriber thread on Substack Chats. MacMillan won by a nose over… over another episode you may yet find in your feed, if you’re lucky. Meanwhile, enjoy this one.
After a bit of a soft launch, I’m starting to let people know that this podcast, and a bunch of fun videos that will quickly become more numerous, are all available on my Youtube channel. You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.
You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page when you view it on your desktop browser.
I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
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