Slivers of Light

Michael Ignatieff is one of Canada’s chief intellectual exports. As a modern-day man of letters, he is a truly transatlantic thinker who gets too little credit at home for his various outputs, which comprise a bookshelf of some sixteen works of non-fiction, three novels, and two screenplays. The albatross of his political career, his urbanity, and his many postings abroad — from director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, to professor of history at the Central European University, in Budapest — were never going to increase his market value as a popular author. But his books are still worth reading, and reading well. His latest, On Consolation, is no different, though one can catch the twinge of lament when he writes that “it takes some time to accept the emergent sense of solidarity with the rest of humankind that begins to dawn . . . when you realize that your...