in an article befitting its subject "Athwart History" (subscription only) is excruciatingly long:

Although he remains the most eminent conservative in the United States, his face and voice recognized by millions, William F. Buckley Jr. has all but retired from public life. At the apex of his influence, when Richard Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, Buckley received flattering notes on presidential letterhead and importuning phone calls from Cabinet members worried about their standing in the conservative movement. Since those heady times, Buckley has, piece by piece, dismantled the formidable apparatus through which he tirelessly promulgated conservative doctrine over the course of half a century. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches (some 70 a year over the course of 40 years, he once estimated). In 1999, he taped the last segment of "Firing Line," the debate program begun in 1966 that invented TV punditry. And, in 2004, he relinquished his controlling stock ownership of National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955 and had continued to direct from behind the scenes even after yielding his place atop the masthead in 1988. Buckley made these serial "divestitures" contentedly, even cheerfully. It left more time for other pursuits—writing novels, weekend sailing (he sold his 36-foot sloop, Patito, but sometimes traverses the Long Island Sound with its new owner, Roger Kimball, who co-edits The New Criterion), and music (he still plays Bach on the piano in his study and invites friends to his rambling weekend home in Stamford, Connecticut, to hear professional recitals on the harpsichord in his music room). In truth, Buckley has never been a wholeheartedly political creature and doesn't quite approve of politicians—not even his favorites. Of his disciples Barry Goldwater and Reagan, Buckley emphasizes, "They came to me." He once told me he discusses politics only when someone's paying him to do it.Still, Buckley, now 81, likes to have his say and, for this reason, has held onto one outlet for regular political commentary: his syndicated column, "On the Right," which he has been writing since 1962. At its peak, the column ran in 300 dailies. Today, Buckley's most dedicated readers are the friends who receive e-mailed versions in advance, though even they, in some cases, may read him less avidly than before or wait to catch up with the selected columns reprinted in the back pages of National Review.Or so it was, until George W. Bush invaded Iraq. The war that has unhinged so many has curiously revitalized Buckley, not as the administration's most eloquent defender but as perhaps its most forceful in-house critic. Untethered to the Bush team—the only insider he knew was Donald Rumsfeld, whom Buckley suggested should consider resigning following the Abu Ghraib scandal—he is also detached from its outer ring of ideologues and flacks. He is, instead, a party of one, who thinks and writes with newfound freedom. While others, left and right, have staked out positions and then fortified them, week after week, Buckley has been thinking his way through events as they have unfolded, looking for new angles of approach, new ways of understanding, drawing on his matchless knowledge of modern conservatism and on his 50-year immersion in the American political scene. It is one of those late-period efflorescences that major figures sometimes enjoy—and, in Buckley's case, it is marked by an unexpected austerity. Like Wallace Stevens's snow man, he has developed a "mind of winter" and, as he scans the bleak vista of the Iraq disaster, "beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." And it has been instructive to observe.