The Corner

I Miss WFB

This is of course not an uncommon sentiment here at NR, but here’s one very specific instance. Over at the Federalist, some folks are debating whether Pope Francis is a dangerous left-winger who must be resisted by all right-thinking people. I leave the combatants to their cudgels, to settle that pressing question among themselves; and desire only to point out a Bill Buckley sentence invoked by one of them, about an earlier pope (Paul VI): “Indeed, the pope sometimes reads like a simplistic Barbara Ward, than whom there are few writers more simplistic.”


That’s an absolutely classic WFB sentence structure: main clause, noun, comma, “than whom,” secondary clause. (NB: At the time, Barbara Ward was a quite famous and influential public intellectual; but I hadn’t heard her name in many years when I ran across this.)

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