“Nearly a century after the beginning of the First World War, historian Tim Cook takes the measure of two leading Canadian protagonists who became personal antagonists—Sam Hughes, the minister who raised the arms and men to fight the war, and Arthur Currie, the general who successfully led the Canadian forces in the trenches of Europe. Dumped from Cabinet by Sir Robert Borden in 1916, Hughes remained in the House of Commons, where he later used his immunity to accuse Currie of sending troops into battle to gain personal glory, even on the final day of the Great War in November 1918. In the end, Currie won a 1927 libel suit against an Ontario newspaper that repeated Hughes’s calumnies and thus ‘finally pried the dead hand of Hughes from his throat.’ Contemporary Canadian politics is widely regarded as a blood sport, but it is child’s play compared to the vicious personal combat between two men whose wartime roles should have made them fast friends, but saw them become mortal enemies instead. In Tim Cook’s skilled hands, the story of Hughes and Currie is as timely as tomorrow’s headlines.” – 2010 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing Jury (L. Ian MacDonald, Rosemary Speirs, and Paul Wells)