In the early '80s I was taken with National Review and, especially, the personality of William F. Buckley, Jr. I went so far as to sneak in to a paid speech he gave to businessmen at a luxury hotel, then quoted from that speech in my own little right-wing college newsletter. Looking back, I think the attraction was more about going against the tide than any deep conviction about, say, supply-side economics. I also have come to think that the Helsinki Accords, achieved under Gerald Ford, had as much to do with the end of the Soviet Union as Buckley's sainted Ronald Reagan. But let that pass. This volume, published shortly after Buckley's death in 2008, collects pieces from his magazine's Notes & Asides column, including points of language, humor, and other miscellany broadly under the heading "fun." (Although obituaries and stinging complaints are featured, too.) I experienced a pang of nostalgia reading through these entries, also some melancholy that the movement Buckley launched has been dissolved into a toxic stew of Know-Nothingism.
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