LETTERS
Big fish, small pool
Sir: Mr Simon Sebag-Montefiore was obviously sustained by mountainous pre- dilections when he interviewed me (`Con- servatism is not over,' 19 May), and I haven't the time or the inclination to reorient him. Three things caught my eye, however, that merit attention.
1) He quotes me, by which I mean puts Inside quotation marks, the sentence: `I know [Mrs Thatcher] well. She has been on my show many times.' a) I don't know Mrs Thatcher well; b) she hasn't been on my show `many times' (she has been on twice); and, while I am at it, c) if I did know her well and if she had been on my show `many tunes' I wouldn't have said so in such an interrogation in those words. Such for- mulations don't generate in me. 2) Mr S-M writes, 'He is as famous for his sailing books, detective novels and tales of his own socialite life as he for his politics. In 1983's Overdrive, for example, he describes his jacuzzi as the "most beautiful indoor pool since Pompeii."' Sorry, but how did that `for example' get in there? For example of what? In fact, my pool (not my jacuzzi) is probably the most beautiful indoor pool since Pompeii. And finally, 3) your correspondent Writes that `the name of the novel that made him famous when he was only 24 [was] God and Man at Yale.' To write that God and Man at Yale was a novel is on the order of writing that Lucky Jim is an account of the life of James II. . . . But the Young man was in an awful hurry, and clearly doesn't have the advantage of restoring himself at night in the most beautiful indoor pool since Pompeii.
William F. Buckley Jr
National Review, 150 East 35th Street, New York
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