The Bane of Buckley
Envy is one of the seven deadly sins but ever present among the writing classes. One would think they’d fake it, but envy, like unrequited love, cannot be easily hidden. I recently read a review of a Bill Buckley biography, one that pricked my fairness button despite the writer’s pretense of objectivity. It was a not-so-subtle attack on my onetime mentor William F. Buckley, but the more the hack tried to hide his envy of the great conservative icon, the more it stuck out, like a giant pimple on the tip of the nose of a handsome woman.
But before I go on about an envious bum called Louis Menand, I’d like to tell you a little bit about how it was back in rainy old London when I started a column in The Spectator, the world’s oldest weekly—a column that ran for 46 years, to be exact. A female journalist came to my London house having asked for an interview after a few months of my column appearing each week. I was 39 years of age and had recently moved to London from Paris. I had covered wars in Vietnam and the Middle East and had decided to settle down in London. My father had bought me a nice house with a double garden in a chic section of town, and word had gotten out that I was a generous party giver.
“The more the hack tried to hide his envy of the great conservative icon, the more it stuck out.”
On the morning of the int
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
