Rex Murphy
"I am sometimes asked how to get a "handle" on Newfoundland. The best route is simply to visit for a good while. The second best, and not as subject to the inclemencies and sadism of Torbay's volatile weather, is to visit the Dictionary of Newfoundland English . . . the finest, most scholarly (and enjoyable) compendium of Newfoundlandia that there is.
Bio last updated February 25th, 2019.
Articles by Rex Murphy
Educated Fleas
By Rex Murphy
December 6, 2016
In this excerpt from an essay that will appear in the next issue of Convivium magazine, Rex Murphy scratches an itch about the unhealthy infestation of inanity on Canadian university campuses
I see Professor Peterson’s exercise on behalf of free speech, as I see his challenge to the enforced conformity of the present day university, as a necessary corrective to soft, slow, but almost inexorable drift towards the idea of education, not as it has always been and must be, as addressed to mind and intellect, but rather as an emotionalized and ideologically laden instrument of ‘healing’ and ‘social justice And so it is that every modern university of any honor whatsoever must surround each one of them with beacons of alarm and caution lest unwarned to their treacheries and horrors, the young eager mind should encounter their sodden beauties and trauma-searing intellectual power fresh, unattended, and open-mindedly
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The Conversation
Rex Murphy
June 1, 2014
Rex Murphy answers questions his way at a Convivium event in Vancouver
Then, providentially or otherwise, an oil boom was going on in Alberta and people like my closest friend, destroyed by the three or four years that he didn't work, got divorced, gave his house to his wife — because we're fairly civilized down there and when they break up, they do those things — and ...
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The Conversation: No Need to Shout
Rex Murphy
March 1, 2012
Any Canadian hearing Rex Murphy speak would guess at once he is from Newfoundland. No one treated to his upper-register vocabulary and literary phrasings would be surprised to know that he was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. The combination is perhaps why the journalistic icon remains almost shockingly personable and engaging.
His most famous line was 'Who speaks for Canada?' I love the idea that Trudeau pressed, and pressed very hard, for the things that bind us together; the things that give us common energy; the things that if something happens in Bonavista, a small town on the east coast of Newfoundland, it should mea...