Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now,

and in the third episode I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky. You can find a link in

the description or search close readings wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm joined by Thomas Meaney to discuss the man he describes as the patron saint of the American right, William F. Buckley.

Thomas Meany is the editor of Granta. Before that, he taught at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

His piece in the latest issue of the LLB is a review

of Sam Tannenhouse's authorised biography, Buckley, The Life and the Revolution that changed America.

Hello Tom, and thank you so much for talking with me today. Thanks for having me on.

So William F. Buckley, as you put it in the opening of your piece, was anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League

administrators, magazine chieftain, Emanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father confessor of the Nixon

White House, Ronald Reagan conciliere, and inspiration to Donald Trump. So we'll come to each of

those incarnations in turn, but broadly speaking, what is it about Buckley?

I suppose why does he merit a thousand page biography?

Yeah, I think that the reason why he's such an important figure goes back to the post-war period

when there was quite a bit of consensus in American politics about how

to run the economy and how to run the state.

And there wasn't the type of opposition that some of the reactionary or conservative businessmen

...