Buckley's Mix » Les characteres

Michael Ignatieff

Frank Buckley — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:34:21 +0000

I was amused to see that, when he met Michael Ignatieff, Obama seems to have spent most of his time talking about friends they have in common. Not surprising, since Ignatieff knows everyone. I mean everyone. Well, at least 6 billion people anyway.

I once received a change of address email from him, with many hundred of cc’s. Kofi Annan. Salman Rushdie. Martin Amis. Had Obama been anyone then, he also would have been on it.

Michael is an exceptionally decent person, and easiest the most attractive leader of the Liberal Party of Canada since Trudeau. Scratch that, I mean since Laurier. Even non-Grits might take some pride in him, as I do. He lectured for my Center twice, once on Simone Weil and once on nationalism, a bravura performance in both cases.

A trivia question: how many politicians do you know who could lecture on Weil?

Fr Richard Neuhaus, R.I.P.

Frank Buckley — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:06:05 +0000

Fr Neuhaus died a month ago, and the current issue of First Things has a collection of his back-of-the-book Public Square comments. It’s a fine magazne, but I wonder how many people, like me, first read with delight Neuhaus’ Public Square, and then turned to the front end of the magazine with a grim sense of duty.

Neuhaus had the finest wit of anyone around, save perhaps Mark Steyn. I am told by one of his close friends that, shortly before he died, he had someone read a biography of Stalin to him, for the dark humor in it.

I visited him once. We had a brief chat, punctuated by calls he took from the White House.

A Fragment

Frank Buckley — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:46:15 +0000

Saint Brychan of Wales had 24 sons and 26 daughters, of whom all of the former and half of the latter became saints in turn. Many of them were martyred by pagan Saxons at places where, remarkably, Saxons never lived. And that is all we know–or, rather, more than all we know–about Saint Brychan.