Michael Ignatieff

As read on BBC Radio 4's 'Book of the Week', On Consolation by Michael Ignatieff offers a deeply poignant and thought-provoking journey through the ways in which humanity has grappled with the ageless quest for solace in the face of profound loss and suffering. Ignatieff explores how writers, composers, and artists have sought comfort and resilience amidst life's hardest trials,...

Poring over his grandparents' memoirs, grainy photographs of his distinguished ancestors, and relating family lore passed from father to son, Michael Ignatieff begins a moving journey to come to terms with his inheritance that is bound up with the violent tumult of Russian history. With great care and complexity, Ignatieff reconstructs a vanished way of life. Beginning in the opulent...

In 1993, Michael Ignatieff set out on a journey to the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Germany, Quebec, Kurdistan, and Northern Ireland to explore the many faces of modern nationalism. Why, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, were so many nation-states disintegrating into ethnic conflict? What did nationalism promise that so many were willing...

What does a person need, not just to survive, but to flourish? In this profound, searching book, Michael Ignatieff explores the many human needs that go beyond basic sustenance: for love, for respect, for community and consolation. In a society of strangers, how might we find a common language to express such needs? Ignatieff's lucid, penetrating enquiry takes him back...

Winner of the Zócalo Book PrizeA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Combines powerful moral arguments with superb storytelling." —New Statesman What moral values do we hold in common? As globalization draws us together economically, are the things we value converging or diverging? These twin questions led Michael Ignatieff to embark on a three-year, eight-nation journey in search of...

In 2005, Michael Ignatieff left his life as a writer and professor at Harvard University to enter the combative world of politics back home in Canada. By 2008, he was leader of the country's Liberal Party and poised—should the governing Conservatives falter—to become Canada's next Prime Minister. It never happened. Today, after a bruising electoral defeat, Ignatieff is back where...

Isaiah Berlin was one of the great thinkers and most electrifying speakers of his time. A magnetic public intellectual and beacon of liberal philosophy, he gained astonishing first-hand experience of some of the pivotal events of the twentieth century. Berlin refused to write an autobiography, but he did agree to talk about himself: in the last decade of his life,...