Atlantic Canada : harmlessly old-fashioned to Americans and Britons alike

Atlantic Canada has always seemed harmlessly old fashionedly American to Americans and harmlessly old fashionedly British to the British.

Useful that , in times of war : because as a result, Atlantic Canadians have always been trusted as go-between liaisons linking these two often-sparring partners.

Back when Atlantic Canada's biggest university was ... McGill

I think in particular the prominent role Maritimers John Humphrey and George Laurence were permitted to play in the Anglo-American led international coalitions that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and built the Atom Bomb .

But I also think somewhat of Maritimer Henry Dawson's role in creating the (equally fractious) Anglo-American led international effort to give us abundant wartime penicillin.

(Interestingly all three of these Maritimers worked for a time at McGill University in Montreal - but then , until the late 1960s, McGill was really just the biggest of Atlantic Canada's universities.)

My book ,Pax Penicillia, will be written reflecting this Atlantic Canadian position - situated midway, culturally, between Washington and London.

And so hopefully, it will also allow me to step outside the still bitter Anglo-American writing war on the exact nature of WWII's "special relationship".....