The many lives of Michael Ignatieff

This month's Prospect contains a profile of Michael Ignatieff by David Herman, tracing his unusual progress from public intellectual in Britain, to academia in the US and now leader of the opposition in Canada. Herman is well qualified to comment: as a writer and TV producer, he worked extensively with Ignatieff during his years on this side of the Atlantic.

Ignatieff, Herman argues, has a unique gift for being in the right career in the right country at the right time. In the 1980s, he left Cambridge for a career in television; ten years later he "knew that an era in British culture was coming to an end," and shifted to America. When a career in politics beckoned, Ignatieff found himself in Canada, a place where "intellectuals do well in… politics, better than in the US or Britain."

This may seem a little unfair to public life in both Britain and the US. The BBC has certainly changed over the last twenty years, but it's still capable of the kind of programming Ignatieff cherished; serious, in-depth and intellectually ambitious. To take a recent example, last month saw the beginning of Justin Webb's magnificent two part examination of  the Bush era on the World Service (still available as a podcast). This is exactly the kind of vehicle that Ignatieff would once have excelled at. Similarly, it might seem strange to assert that an academic like Ignatieff would find it difficult to achieve political office in the US, as opposed to Canada (what of Barack Obama?). Even so, Herman offers a persuasive insider's account of the many lives of the man who many Canadians now think of as their future leader.

Ignatieff himself was a regular contributor to his Prospect throughout his time in the UK, writing for us over ten times between 1996 and 2006. To mark his latest ascendancy and David Herman's profile, we've made all of his writings for us over the years free to read online. Just click here to browse through them—and let us know what you think below.