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OTTAWA — On book-writing, as on a great many other things, Winston Churchill had it right — what starts out as an amusement quickly becomes a mistress, then a master and finally a tyrant.

My burnt offering, “Trudeau — the Education of a Prime Minister,” hits the stores on Tuesday. It’s a book with the shelf-life of frozen yogurt, at least in this edition, given the looming general election.

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But it was a great adventure, particularly when the SNC-Lavalin affair unravelled after I’d delivered the manuscript.

There is nothing like writing a book for acquainting a person with a subject.

I have a far better grasp of Canada’s cocksure 23rd prime minister at the end of the process than I had at the start.

As Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s biographer, John English, noted in his peerless first volume, the father’s seeming contradictions were more often consistencies. The son shares many of those apparently paradoxical gifts — intelligence and discipline but also spontaneity and risk-taking.