Sad news today. I’ll share an anecdote and make an observation.

The anecdote: A number of years ago, I helped put on a series of talks for young writers in D.C. We had a different speaker each week. Once it was Kristol. During the Q&A, somebody asked him what we should read in order to become better writers. He made a number of suggestions. Then he pulled a paperback copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets from his jacket. He said he carried it constantly and read from it again and again. If memory serves, he praised Shakespeare’s economy — the ability to say a lot in just a few lines. Up to then, I had viewed Kristol primarily as a social-science intellectual. This made me appreciate the breadth and depth of his interests, which of course extended into literature and culture. He really was a kind of renaissance man.

The observation: There is currently no good biography of Kristol. As far as I know, none is in the works. It’s too bad that now nobody will be able to write one using firsthand interviews with Kristol as a main source. We conservatives are normally good caretakers of our own history. We examine it, write it, and rewrite it. In this case, we’ve missed an important opportunity to enrich our narrative. Someday, a good book on Kristol will be written. It might even be called The Kristols–i.e., it will be a biography of a whole family, not just Irving. Yet it would be a better book if the primary research had started a few years ago, when Irving was still able to take our questions.