Robert Fulford, who has died aged 92, was one of Canada’s leading cultural journalists.

As a critic and essayist, his expertise spanned art, literature, architecture and music. As a columnist on current affairs, he grappled with some of the most urgent questions in Canadian justice and politics.

His famously clear prose was the product of fastidious rewriting, always at least twice, a rule he shared with the generations of younger writers he edited and mentored. Publishing, as he used to say, was a “necessary evil” that sadly stopped the rewriting process.