For close to 50 years, John W Holmes (1910-1988) played a leading role in the development and interpretation of Canada and its place in the world. Long-time students of Canadian foreign policy still recall his remarkable abilities as a diplomat, essayist, historian, commentator, university professor, and mentor. Nevertheless, today, Holmes's name no longer resonates with the average Canadian as it may have in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a frequent commentator on television and in the newspapers. Of the substantial body of scholarship he accumulated in the 1970s and 1980s, his two-volume history of postwar Canadian foreign policy continues to appear on some course outlines and is consulted by university students (particularly in history departments), but a great deal of his other writing is relatively unknown to contemporary students and policymakers.Given the increasingly presentist focus of the study of Canada's place in the world, this is perhaps hardly surprising. Canadians today, or so we are often told, face challenges that are nothing like those before them. The world is more complex, and as a result we need new solutions, new approaches, and new ways of understanding our globalized village. What relevance, some might ask, could a man who passed away before the Cold War even came to a close, let alone before 9/11, have to Canadians with an interest in foreign policy today?To mark the centenary of Holmes's birth, the editors of International Journal asked the two of us - Chapnick is a historian who has just published a biography of Holmes; Nossal, a political scientist, was a student of Holmes's - to examine what relevance Holmes's reflections on Canadian foreign policy might have in the 21st century.1 We invited nine commentators to write short papers inspired by some OfHoImCS1S most notable quotations. Our contributors were selected with Holmes's own approach to such academic exercises in mind: a mix of young and old, academics and policy practitioners, with both traditional and nontraditional approaches to the study of Canadian foreign policy. Some, like Nossal, knew Holmes well; others, like Chapnick, had never met him; indeed, some contributors had hardly read his work before they were asked to participate. AU, however, have brought a flair for writing and a depth of analysis to the quotations that would have made Holmes proud.There is no denying that the world has changed since Holmes's name stopped appearing in newspapers, magazines, and academic publications across Canada and around the world. Denis Stairs, whose academic career spans both Holmes's most prolific years and the two decades that have followed, captures those changes effectively in his contribution to this collection. But Stairs also demonstrates that much of the international context is not quite as different as contemporary analysts often make it out to be. Moreover, one might even venture to say that the demands of the 21st century, while more complex, are hardly greater than those faced by Holmes during his junior years as a civil servant in the 1940s. Two years after he joined the Department of External Affairs in 1943, Holmes and Lester Pearson were leaving the Hotel Savoy in London when they noticed a news bulletin informing them of the detonation of the world's first atomic weapon in Hiroshima. The paradigm shift faced by policymakers that day was overwhelming, and its impact on the development of foreign policy was no less significant than that of 9/11 on the world more recently. The ability to be flexible, to adapt to changing international circumstances, and to manage the unexpected are all skills that Holmes was forced to master. Given the events of the last decade, the lessons that he learned, and passed on to generations of Canadians from all walks of life, are all the more relevant and worth recalling than they ever have been.John Wendell Holmes was born in London, Ontario, on 18 June 1910. The second of four children, he was brought up in a household that was fairly standard for a smaller city in Ontario at the time. …