Airborne

A rare provenance from the library of Romain Gary, on a title devoted by the author to his transatlantic crossing by boat with his son. Gary probably met Buckley during his stay in New York in the early 1950s. A former lieutenant in the United States Army, Buckley was at that time a conservative essayist and journalist, who in 1955 would found the National Review, an American political biweekly that defines itself as the country’s “most widely read and most influential” conservative magazine of opinion.

A television personality, he hosted 1,429 episodes of the television program Firing Line from 1966 to 1999: for more than thirty years he was one of the leading thinkers and activists of the American right, working for the modern American conservatism of a presidential candidate such as Barry Goldwater, or of President Ronald Reagan.

In addition to political guests, always interviewed one-on-one, Buckley also hosted numerous writers, among them Jorge Luis Borges, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Anthony Burgess, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, James Baldwin and Bret Easton Ellis. Firing Line was the longest-running single-host political program in the history of American television.