William F Buckley Jr

“I love William F Buckley Jr as a human being and as a presence in our public life. I was at a tribute once to Buckley and I said if I could be five per cent as effective on behalf of my own ideas as Buckley was on behalf of his, I would consider my life an enormous success. There was something about his open spirit that just appealed to me very much. You get the spirit of Buckley in some ways better in his fiction, and he wrote a lot of fiction. I was debating which novels to put on the list – he had a wonderful series based on a CIA agent called Blackford Oakes, a wonderful name for a CIA agent. The first one, I think, was called Saving the Queen. I have read religiously every Buckley spy novel as it came out. Spy novels would have been good to put on the list as a reflection of the Cold War Buckley. The reason I put the McCarthy book on the list is because Buckley came to public attention first, of course, with his book God and Man at Yale, but also with his robust defense of McCarthy in the 1950s.” Read more...

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E J Dionne, Political Commentator

“What is important about God and Man at Yale is that, although it’s not the best argued or even the most serious of modern conservative books, it changed the argument. It made the conservative argument about culture. What Buckley is saying is that if you want to identify your adversary, he’s in the ivory tower of the Ivy League, and not only there, but in the most conservative of the Ivy League universities.” Read more...

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Sam Tanenhaus, Journalist