William F Buckley Jr was, above all else, a debater. He’s perhaps best known today for jousting with the liberal writer Gore Vidal in 1968 during the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. This formed the centrepiece of the 2015 Netflix documentary, Best of Enemies, and an acclaimed 2021 play by James Graham of the same name. Three years earlier, in 1965, Buckley also debated the novelist and essayist James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union on the motion: “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

But many people, including me, have discovered Buckley through Firing Line: the television show he hosted from 1966 to 1999, in which he argued with a variety of distinguished public intellectuals, from Norman Mailer and Noam Chomsky to Germaine Greer and Christopher Hitchens. In these video clips, readily available today on YouTube, he’s both charming and ready to tear down his opponent’s arguments. And yet he was also a builder, rather than simply a pugilist, and became the preeminent figure of the American intellectual Right from the moment he founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955 until his death in 2008.

In the late 90s he appointed the critic and journalist Sam Tanenhaus as his official biographer, after Tanenhaus had published a biography of the writer and ex-communist Whittaker Chambers with the help of Buckley. After more than two decades, we have the result: Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. It’s an enjoyable and fascinating romp through American political and cultural life in much of the 20th century. And it helps the book, too, that Buckley had such a colourful personality. He possessed a peculiar mid-Atlantic drawl, very expressive eyebrows, and an idiosyncratic vocabulary. He made conservatism seem fun.

Buckley was mostly raised in Connecticut, but he spent parts of his childhood in France and some of his adolescence in England. His first language was Spanish because he had a Mexican nanny. From such a worldly background, one might conclude Buckley was an urbane and jet-setting bon vivant. He loved sailing. He spent his winters skiing in Gstaad in Switzerland. He owned a maisonette in Park Avenue, and socialised with Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov and Charlie Chaplin.

But this was only a part of him. He also passionately stood up against any liberalism and progressivism in a way that put him at an awkward angle to much of elite Manhattan’s social life. His hostility to the Soviet Union was another essential part of his political worldview: throughout his life, he defended Joseph McCarthy and his campaign to expose the communists who had allegedly infiltrated the federal government.