‘A liberal mugged by reality’

Irving Kristol didn’t coin the term ‘neoconservative’ but he was the first person to run with it. Although it was originally intended as an insult towards those alleged to have abandoned their initial ‘liberalism’, Kristol wasn’t bothered with quibbling. ‘It usually makes no sense… to argue over nomenclature,’ he once said. ‘If you can, you take what people call you and run with it.’ Besides, ‘having been named Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice’.

Some of the best qualities of Kristol — who died last week — can be gleaned from such casual phrases. His lightness of spirit, his acceptance that there are things you can do nothing about, and his keenness to sweep aside the peripheral and get on to the important things.

With his 70-year marriage to the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, and via their son William Kristol, he was, like other first-generation neoconservatives, the father of a neoconservative dynasty. But pre-eminent among a generation of extraordinary thinkers, he radiated the good-humoured and benign qualities expected of a godfather.