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run. John Diefenbaker kept six copies, one annotated on every page, while swearing he had never read it. That he resented it profoundly is understatement’s understatement. In the Diefenbaker Centre at the University of Saskatchewan is a note, in the Chief’s own hand, the kindest sentence of which reads, “He [Newman] is the literary scavenger of the trash baskets on Parliament Hill.”
    Newman sets a rich board, but for many I predict the crowning soufflé will be the chapter on Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel. If the subtitle of Newman’s memoir—
Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power
—has to earn its keep, the chapter-essay on the Blacks will more than do it.
    Mr. Newman has a unique purchase on this great fable of our time. He claims, not without daring, to have “invented” Conrad Black. I suspect the Lord of Crossharbour assiduously asserts that the patent on the great miracle of himself is his and his alone. But Mr. Newman, as
Maclean’s
editor and as the earliest biographer of Lord Black, was one of the first amplifiers of the Black persona and had singular access at the initial stages of Lord Black’s acceleration into fame, fortune and folly.
    Mr. Newman’s account is superior to others because he is neither clinically neutral (a rare stance in accounts of The Conrad) nor dripping with glee (a much more crowdedassembly) over Lord Black’s current miseries and mischiefs. In the early stages of the now-familiar rise, Mr. Newman saw much in Lord Black to admire—the potential to shatter the conventionalities of the dull Canadian business world, intellect in tandem with aspiration. This threads his account with something close to anger that Lord Black turned out to be just another acquisitive egomaniac, one with an absurd itch for archaic status, and distinguished only, as it turns out, by a more generous vocabulary than less-fluent compeers in the greed game—the CEO of, say, Enron.
    When Mr. Newman is angry, his light touch and wicked pen take on a degree of flame and sharpness that make for wonderful writing. His thumbnail cameos approach a Muggeridgean callousness. Of Lord Black: “Conrad had turned himself into a latter day Citizen Kane. He looked like a young Orson Welles but behaved like an old William Randolph Hearst.”
    Of Barbara Amiel: “Even in repose, she was always posing, playing the femme fatale in her own movie. While she kept insisting it was her mind not her body that merited attention, it was widely suspected she was Mother Nature’s little helper.”
    There are many, a wicked many, more. In the caustic-asides department, Mr. Newman is one with Keats: “Load every rift with ore.”
    Mr. Newman has gulped a lot of life. He has a taste for panorama, but it never overrules detail and individuality, the quirks and quiddities of each personality. This makeshim an excellent diarist. He has a zeal for taking in the illuminating anecdote, and a flair for reproducing it in print.
    I have remarked on the frightening industry and variousness of Mr. Newman’s career, but there must be time to remark on the writing. He is, on the evidence of this book, a very cheerful fellow. It might seem undistinguished to call
Here Be Dragons
a “happy” book, but it is. His observations and
obiter dicta
are crafted, keen and frequently funny. They save the book from the slightest shadow of tediousness and self-absorption. He is not afraid to boast of his accomplishments, personal or professional, romantic or scribal, but does so with insouciance and charm. He has enjoyed his ride, is bemusedly dazzled by his success, has savoured his talents, clearly loves writing, and values the wiles and stratagems that gave him entry where others (
Hic Sunt Dracones
) feared to tread.
    He has a style that can work these various effects and responses. It can dispense an anecdote, sketch a character in a mini-essay, turn lyrical at moments of reflection or nostalgia, and is by turns pungent and relaxed, bare for