Twiston Davies, an ebullient, slightly cherubic-looking, and good-humoured sort of fellow in strategically rumpled clothes, pays particular attention in his job to dead Canadians. So much so that he has just published a really quite entertaining and informative selection of his greatest hits: Canada from Afar: The Daily Telegraph Book of Canadian Obituaries (Dundurn, $14.99), with a preface by Conrad Black himself. Included are figures as different as K. C. Irving and George Woodcock, or Margaret Laurence and the Dowager Lady Beaverbrook. The scope, then, is national, and the range almost comically wide. Some of the people have such striking names as: Billy Browne, Punch Dickins, Buck Crump, Major-General Johnnie Plow, Brigadier-General Swatty Wotherspoon, Flying Phil Gagliardi, Willy Floody, Colonel Bucko Watson, and of course the Marquess of Exeter, who was really one Martin Cecil, the leader of a religious cult at 100 Mile House, B.C.

Twiston Davies explains that about a decade ago, in an attempt to gather together a file of advance obituaries for Telegraph staff members, everyone was asked on an outing to Shrewsbury School in Shropshire, "We went up by steam train," he recalls. "Nobody had to pay but everyone had to produce his or her own obituary to get on board. I spent a lot of time telling people, `Make sure you do it.' But when the crunch came I'd actually not done one for myself. That morning as I went out of the door my wife handed me my obituary." The thriller-writer Tim Heald later wrote a short story about the bizarre excursion. It's called "The Obituarists' Outing".

In the late 1930s, the Spectator asked a series of prominent Britons such as H. G. Wells to write what they thought their own Fleet Street obituaries would be like. Some, Bertrand Russell's in particular, are hilarious parodies. When he was working at the New York Times, Gay Talese once asked Alden Whitman, the Haligonian who was the Times's chief obit writer for years, to guess what his own paper would say. Whitman was modest. So is Twiston Davies when I beg him to play along with the same game. The difference is that he's such a wonderful talker that I know I should simply shut up and let him ramble on in his eloquent fashion.

"What would my obituary say? I imagine from the Daily Telegraph point of view that it would say that I was on the paper for an extremely long time and have been letters editor three times and have helped build up the letters section. It might say that my abiding interest in life, I suppose, is the fact that I was born a Canadian, that this has coloured and influenced an awful lot of my journalistic career. It might tell how I was born in Montreal but taken to Britain when I was a few months old, only to get tuberculosis there at the age of four and be brought back to Montreal, because there was a drug called streptomycin which you couldn't get in Europe but which you could get here in Canada. So those are my first abiding recollections of Canada. I went up to Westmount in Montreal only a couple of days ago and walked round the sites I remembered, seeing the house and so on.

"But I don't want to take this too far, as I think that obituarists and letters editors are not of great interest to other obituarists, who're naturally concerned with people who go out and do things. But possibly something might occur in my life-possibly not until I'm seventy-eight years old-some incident which could completely transform the obituary.

"I can give you one very striking example of this sort of thing. There was a former Labour MP who died in, I think, 1987. He had been quite well-known at one time, and I had a call from his distant cousin suggesting that we should probably publish an obituary. I went down to the library and asked for any cuttings on him. Two fat packets came back, describing this man's career in Parliament and also the fact that he'd been an actor, specializing in roles as a judge. A minute later the librarian came back and said he'd found something else as well. This was a file that showed that our subject had been a bright and upcoming young man in the Lord Chancellor's office-making speeches in the right places, prosecuting in the right courts. He was clearly destined for a great career. But in 1939 he did the decent thing and joined up to serve King and Country, and went with the British Expeditionary Force to France-the whole thing was complete chaos as you know.

"He was a lawyer who presumably had never in his life worked later than 4:30 in the afternoon, but he was kept up for several nights in a row, constantly under fire. He had a terrible time. And when he got back to London eventually he just, well, went on a toot. He spent 137 pounds more than was in his bank account. He never went to bed before seven o'clock in the morning, according to his court martial at Chelsea Barracks. As a result of this, he didn't practise law in Britain again after he left the army in 1950 (although I did find one cutting that referred to his having defended a major accused of stealing army blankets in Brussels in 1947). When he did return to England he took a small holding and wrote a bestselling book about it-Four Acres and a Cow or something like that. Then, and I can't remember how, he got into the early days of television, appearing as a judge, and then in films. Eventually he became a Labour politician.

"So there was one fact that completely changed the way that man's life should be seen, and it showed his great resilience. That's an example."

Twiston Davies's conversation veers off into other areas; I am content to interject a few stray questions, such as "Whom did you leave out of the book?"

"Well," he replies, "there were one or two soldiers who were involved in operations whose stories we had told before. That was mainly a question of quality. In any case, I don't think it's necessary for the Canadians we do to have any ties to Britain at all. To me, one of the most interesting in the book is the painter Sveva Caetani, whose death was big stuff in the Vernon Daily News in B.C. but was missed by the Vancouver papers, CP, and the Globe. We only got it ourselves because we learned the news from our Rome obituarist-the fact that she was the last of the aristocratic Roman family, one of whose members became, if I remember correctly, Pope Boniface VIII." That was in the year 1294.

"You see, she came to Canada at a very early age and lived in obscurity in Vernon but she did have this extraordinary life. She was brought up by her father, the Duke of Sermoneta. The family led a fairly normal existence until he died in, I think, 1935. Then, after that, the mother, who was not integrated into Canadian society at all-she spoke no English-said to her daughter, `If you leave me I shall die.' She managed to bully her daughter into cutting herself off from the outside world, and for sixteen years Sveva never left her house and garden. Quite extraordinary! Eventually she was allowed out because there weren't so many servants to do the marketing any more. But she had to ring her mother every half hour.

"When her mother died, Sveva went to be a teacher in Victoria, came back, and then in later middle age began to produce these strange allegorical paintings. Her late father would appear as a figure in a boat-this kind of thing. She drew on a lot of religions. There was a certain technical competence. She managed to get that particularly luminous quality that she said she had found in Moghul paintings in India. I don't think they were great paintings but what was fascinating for me was: this could have been a story from Henry James.

"And this is someone whom no-one would consider important in any way. It was just a good story. That's the advantage of obituaries. Of course you do the obviously important people, but at the end of the day the valuable ones are those nobody's heard of and whom, if you hadn't done them, nobody ever would. That's the great joy of it."

(Caetani's paintings, with accompanying text, appear in Recapitulation: A Journey, Coldstream Books, $70 cloth.) Twiston Davies came to the attention of journalism when he was working on the Winnipeg Free Press but "decided that I didn't want to stay in Winnipeg, largely because, although I was immensely happy-I knew I could die happy there-but that I would die young as well, life being so good. So I came back to Britain to get married. I was offered a job on the Winnipeg Tribune of blessed memory. It was quickly withdrawn. I was also offered a job on the Sydney Morning Herald. But my wife wasn't particularly keen to go to Australia as she'd heard about the bugs. So I looked round in England and I was offered a position by the Daily Telegraph. The offer arrived one post ahead of an offer from the Financial Times. So I went to the Daily Telegraph. This was 1970. I was a news sub, which I got rather fed up with after a time, and then I worked on their books pages, which I found immensely satisfying."

He goes on: "At the time the Telegraph was very stultified and I had considered leaving. One of the things that held me there was that I could feel that there was going to be a change. The regime that had started in the late 1920s was not going to last. It had its virtues, but there was something wrong. There wasn't an obvious heir who wanted to take over. I felt I wanted to see what would happen." Enter Conrad Black.

Among Black's innovations was the idea of the obituary as a corking good read. "His feeling was that we ought to concentrate on the personality, as opposed to a strict recitation of the events of the person's achievements. To write them, he hired Hugh Massingberd, a former editor of Burke's Peerage. I was drafted in to help him, as Massingberd had never written for a newspaper before. By that point [1986] I'd been on the Telegraph a long time and was interested in Canadians and used to write about them. But I have to tell you that whereas before one heard people say, `Canadians are boring!', now, with the new proprietor, they didn't."

He returns to touring-author mode. "For me the extraordinary thing about the book is that it shows how many and how diverse are the links between Canada and Great Britain, primarily of course in person-to-person terms. When Canadians come to London, they generally don't want to see other Canadians. This is markedly different from Australians, who congregate in certain areas. I know that the High Commission has considered whether they ought to do more for Canadians in Britain, but they've found that really there isn't much interest in the idea."

Then it's back to office affairs at the Daily Telegraph. "The great irony," says David Twiston Davies of the change in ownership at the paper, "is that when the revolution did come it was rather an unpleasant experience. It was like going over the top in war: suddenly the person next to you wasn't there. But I managed to survive."

Who could wish for a better epitaph?