Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice...incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets.

Companion of the Order of Canada. Along with the Examiner newspaper they owned the Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper CHEX-AM CKWS-AM CHEX-TV and CKWS-TV. He also participated in theatrical productions as a child when he developed a lifelong interest in drama.

William Robertson Davies CC OOnt FRSC FRSL (August 28 1913 – December 2 1995) was a Canadian novelist playwright critic journalist and professor. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.