I had the great pleasure of meeting Bill Buckley back in July 2005, a day after the terrorist bombings in London.

He personified the existential far opposite of that nihilistic violence. A calm, positive, witty, astute, sophisticated and reasonable man who lived for and through ideas.

Above all specific and profound ideas about personal responsibility and what that implies for the citizen and the state. His thinking and the freedom-loving spirit behind it gave him and his vast output of work a towering moral status in communist Europe. It is alas not so easy to think of a European intellectual of whom the same might be said.