His political aspirations he attributes to growing up the son of a federal civil servant, who worked for external affairs minister and then prime minister Lester B. Pearson. “I grew up in a house where you knew, if you wanted to get stuff done, it was the politicians who carried the can. My dad could advise or propose or suggest, but it was Mike Pearson who made the decisions.

“So I grew up in that kind of a household, an earnest household. There was lots of stuff across the dinner table about what we would call public policy.

Writing in Old Boys, however, he acknowledges that UCC also encouraged him to be an authoritarian prig. And nothing illustrates his youthful ego — and what could lie beneath the surface — quite like the way he treated his younger brother.

Andrew followed him to UCC in 1962. A self-described “fat little prick,” he was absent his brother's talents. He was not an athlete, not adept at writing and public speaking, not competitive. While Michael was “God,” and “everybody bowed and scraped when he passed,” Andrew became known as “fatty,” “piggy,” “slob,” “spaz,” “big ass” — and “Iggy,” a nickname he loathed.

“Michael was very sweet and he told me how wonderful UCC would be. Then we went to my Aunt Helen's house and again he was very sweet. My Aunt Helen [Ignatieff, the boys' in loco parentis in Canada] again impressed on him the importance of him looking out for me. Then we went to the school and he introduced me to all the masters in the prep.

Not existing was for many years the sine qua non for Andrew in his relationship with both his brother and his father. For a 1992 article in Saturday Night magazine, he recounted to writer Sandra Martin his first memory of Ignatieff family life.

It is the early 1950s. The family is holidaying on Long Island. Alison Ignatieff is off to one side, sunbathing and reading. George and Michael are building a sand castle with turrets, moats and dikes to try to hold back the incoming tide. Pudgy Andrew is plunked in the middle of the castle, trapped and wailing, his distress escalating with each wave that washes over the walls and douses him with sand and sea.

Michael, wiry as a strand of tin, is shoring up walls to the magisterial commands of his father, and both of them are completely oblivious to Andrew's unhappiness.

“They were having the time of their lives and I was being ignored because I was fat and small and couldn't move around and I had sand in my bathing suit,” he said.

In the fall of 1965, Mr. Ignatieff began working toward a degree in history at University of Toronto's Trinity College, at that time another bastion of Anglo-Canadian elitism and privilege.

With a federal election scheduled for that November, Michael's interest in politics led him to the campaign of Liberal candidate Marvin Gelber. A friend of George and Alison Ignatieff, Mr. Gelber was seeking re-election in York South, the Toronto riding he had taken from New Democrat David Lewis two years earlier.

Put in charge of 20 polls, the 18-year-old Michael Ignatieff recruited his friends from UCC and Bishop Strachan to canvass for Mr. Gelber. They lost. Mr. Lewis recaptured the riding and went on to become national leader of the NDP. The sixties, with their patina of student political radicalism, were a time of campus demonstrations, protests and the phenomenon of teach-ins — mass lectures and discussions on important and controversial issues of the day.

Mr. Ignatieff took part in a sit-in to protest against recruiting at U of T's engineering faculty by Dow Chemical Co., supplier of incendiary napalm and the Agent Orange defoliant to the U.S. military. And as a second-year student, he and Jeff Rose, later Ontario president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and a deputy minister in the NDP government of Premier Bob Rae, took charge of organizing the U of T teach-ins.

They brought in the big names, speakers such as United Nations secretary-general U Thant, renown anti-apartheid campaigner Trevor Huddleston, Irish writer Conor Cruise O'Brien, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded the assassinated Martin Luther King as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Mr. Ignatieff's philosopher uncle, George Grant.

Mr. Rae also was on the U of T campus at the time — not at Anglican Trinity but at secular University College. His mother and diplomat father were friends of Alison and George Ignatieff, although the two sons had met only briefly as children. The future premier was a dervish in student politics, writing for the university newspaper, organizing protests against the Vietnam War, getting elected to student council, campaigning for student representation on the university's board of governors.

Late one Saturday morning, after breakfast in his residence dining hall, he was holding forth to an informal audience on his dim view of the campus teach-ins. A dyspeptic undergraduate with dark glasses listened with a look of visible irritation. Finally he asked Mr. Rae just who he thought he was.

Today, both are pursuing the Liberal leadership, but back then they became inseparable. They moved out of residence into an apartment above Salamander Schmidt's shoe store on Bloor Street West, just north of the campus. They partied together, wrote political articles for The Varsity, travelled together — along with Jeff Rose — to a house owned by the Ignatieff in France.

In the summer, Mr. Ignatieff worked as a reporter for The Globe and Mail, and I, too, remember him as being serious and reserved, but a wonderful person to have a conversation with. The newspaper's library contains articles written with a skill and maturity astonishing for a 19-year-old, including a first-person story from August, 1966, about trying to meet girls through a computerized dating service.

Senior Liberals, including James Coutts, then Mr. Trudeau's principal secretary, suggested that he leave university and work for the party full-time. Mr. Ignatieff said no.

“I had a very clear feeling that, first, I had to go back to school and, second that, I was too light — I didn't know a goddamned thing about anything, and I felt I needed some weight,” he explains.

And then he says something that will apply to almost every turning point in his life: “I think I have a good sense of endings, when I'm spinning my wheels, when I'm no longer developing, when I've come to the end of something.

In the spring of 1973, inmates at a Massachusetts state prison in Walpole, a town just south of Harvard, rioted in a fireball of rage, destroying much of the institution's interior (including the state's electric chair).

As the authorities prepared to retake control, the inmates — most of them black — asked for volunteer civilian observers to stay with them in their cellblocks as protection against violent retribution by the police and prison guards.

Michael Ignatieff, now 25 and working on his doctorate in history, not only volunteered himself but organized a group of fellow Harvard grad students to be locked up for two nights with the prisoners. He was no stranger to the place. For four years, he had spent almost every Tuesday night talking to black lifers at Walpole and its sister institution, Norfolk prison. It was his first encounter with people who had fallen through the gratings: young men whose lives were effectively over at 23, at 24 — his age.

After the riot, he took the toughest assignment: the maximum-security wing housing the most dangerous and unstable offenders, and one of the students he persuaded to come along was Alexander Keyssar, now a professor of history and social policy at Harvard.

He went to the prison because his doctoral thesis was on the role of force in the maintenance of social order and the limits to coercion that the state can legitimately impose on those who deviate from society's rules.

His first book, his dissertation, A Just Measure of Pain, published in 1978, encompassed what he had learned from the prisoners. He saw what American society looked like at the bottom. It made an indelible impression.

But why would a product of Anglo-Canadian elitism and privilege be interested in violence and social order? Because of the man he tried ceaselessly to please: his father.

Not safe as a small boy fleeing Russia. Not safe as a young refugee in England subjected to ethnic taunts. Not safe from always feeling like an outsider in Canada (he was 15 when his family arrived here in 1928), of not feeling accepted by the elite, despite all his accomplishments as a diplomat and marrying the niece of Vincent Massey, Canada's first native-born governor-general and the closest thing to an Anglo aristocrat the country has likely known — and projecting these insecurities onto his son.

Sitting in his office off Parliament Hill three decades later, Mr. Ignatieff struggles to make sense of what Walpole meant to him: “I think going to that prison.” He stops and tries again: “I'd had a sheltered Canadian middle-class life. I think my whole life I've been fascinated by this sense that the world is divided into zones of safety and zones of danger and violence, and the distance between the two is very small.

The Harvard student in a cellblock — making links between his zones of safety and violence and those experienced by his father — may have looked like the worldly, self-confident kid from Trinity and UCC. In reality, he was feeling anything but cocky.

The Walpole ordeal was a nightmarish experience for him, and back in the hallowed halls of Harvard, he was finding life brutal. He had come from provincial University of Toronto where he had been at the top of his class and was now discovering that everyone he met at America's pre-eminent institution of higher learning was smarter than he was. He wrote letters to friends in Toronto telling them to do their graduate work elsewhere.

His chum Bob Rae was similarly unhappy. Mr. Rae had gone on from U of T to Oxford's Balliol College as a Rhodes scholar and was likewise intimidated by his encounter with the best and brightest from around the world.

He turned up at Mr. Ignatieff's apartment for a weekend, and stayed six months, U of T's two former golden boys consoling each other far from home.

Mr. Rae eventually travelled on — staying with his friend, he wrote, “only delayed solving the problem” — leaving Mr. Ignatieff alone to brood on Harvard as “the court of the Manchu emperors” with its cult of The Professor surrounded by fawning students.

In any event, he accepted a job teaching undergraduate history at the University of British Columbia. It was to begin in the fall of 1976. He was 29, and decided to go to England for a summer holiday.

One evening at a street party on Charlotte Street in London's Soho district, he encountered Susan Barrowclough, a beautiful, vivacious film historian and rising young British intellectual who had studied under Federico Fellini — and sang Verdi off-key.

She was erudite beyond her years, and wrote scholarly articles on Canadian cinema. She had a particular expertise on Quebec filmmaker Jean-Pierre Lefebvre.

She infected the Vancouver film community with her energy and enthusiasm. She was a dedicated programmer — Cinémathèque at the time was screening 300 films a year.

But the fun didn't last long — in 1978, Mr. Ignatieff applied for a six-year research fellowship in the history of classical political economy at King's College, Cambridge.

Its guru was radical Cambridge historian Raphael Samuel, with his scruffy canvas jackets and long, thin wispy hair pushed across his head to hide his baldness. Its nerve centre was his house, an 18th-century weaver's cottage in Spitalfields in London's East End. Its glue was the monthly journal members of the collective edited and their tight bonds of friendship.

They shared interests in the intersections of history, philosophy and politics. They wrote for avant-garde publications such as New Society. They had common enthusiasms for music, theatre and film. They met in each other's apartments to talk and party.

Like Mr. Ignatieff, they have since moved on in life. When I call and ask them to talk about him, they invite me to their homes in Islington, the north London enclave of the well-to-do intelligentsia. Or we meet in their academic offices or some fashionable wine bar off Fleet Street. Unlike Mr. Ignatieff, for the most part, they still feel an unalloyed bond with their past.

Prof. Samuel and the group affectionately embraced the Ignatieffs, a couple everyone marked as being passionately in love and engrossed in each other's lives. They liked Susan's quick mind, her warmth and vitality, and her independence from Michael — indeed, her intellectual competitiveness with him.

The women found him enormously charming, a sympathetic listener, a man who didn't talk down to them, who was self-deprecating, funny, always good for a giggle — two women friends used that same phrase to describe him — appealingly intense, and exotic with his Canadian accent.

He and another member of the collective, Hugh Brody, a talented filmmaker and anthropologist, found cerebral soulmates in each other. They critiqued each other's manuscripts, revelled in each other's ideas and decided to collaborate on a television series proposed by Mr. Ignatieff. “The Science of Desire” was to be a four-part documentary about men who are experts on female sexuality, but the first segment, an examination of Freud, got out of hand and turned into a screenplay for a feature-length drama. They got funding from the British Film Institute, persuaded actors Paul Scofield and Maria Schell to play the lead roles for a small fraction of their standard fees, and the result was Nineteen-Nineteen, directed by Mr. Brody and completed in 1983.

Instead, they drifted apart — as Michael Ignatieff would drift away from all but a very few in the group. He had arrived at an “ending.” He had decided that he was no longer developing. He was about to reinvent himself, and friends would be hurt in the process.

He didn't apply for a new post. He had had long talks with Sally Alexander, who had become a close friend, about finding a more satisfying definition of himself — about wanting to pursue a writing career and engage more publicly with the issues of the day.

No one was surprised when he suddenly announced in 1983 that he was leaving the academy to become a freelance journalist — “going over the monastery wall,” as he put it.

Margaret Thatcher had come to power in Britain with a mandate to reverse the country's economic decline and reduce the role of the state in the economy. She let unemployment rise from one million to three million and, by some estimates, five million. She slashed public services. She was determined to curtail the power of the trade unions.

In March, 1984, British miners went on strike against her plan to rationalize coal production by closing 20 mines and shedding 20,000 jobs. In response, she branded the strikers “the enemy within” whose values were not those of the British people, and vowed to destroy their union and its militant leader, Arthur Scargill. Within months, the miners and their families were destitute, starving, reduced to scavenging on the mines' slag heaps for bits of fuel to stay warm.

One night, Mr. Ignatieff went to a miners' benefit organized in a north London house by one of his friends. Some miners' wives had been invited. There were buckets on the floor to drop donations into. He found it one of the most uncomfortable gatherings he had ever attended.

In Mr. Ignatieff's account, he saw the manifest British class system in the house: a divide between the women from the mining towns and the condescending north London middle-class intelligentsia, his friends and acquaintances of the left, who didn't believe in the strike but couldn't bring themselves to tell the miners that Mr. Scargill was leading them over a cliff.

He says he became acutely aware of how much he hated the British class system. He saw how wrong he had been to think that, as an expatriate Canadian, he had been handed a sort of free pass to stand apart from what he saw as class games being played by his left-wing friends.

He realized that, despite the years he had spent with the History Workshop, he was not a socialist; he was a liberal — “left of centre, but always a liberal.” He knew he was no Thatcherite, but he felt that Britain could not continue to produce so much coal and the left was being intellectually dishonest in not accepting the fact.

And so, while Mr. Fraser, now master of U of T's Massey College, was telling Globe readers about his “good year,” Mr. Ignatieff wrote an article for the December, 1984, issue of New Statesman stating that the coal miners were indeed acting against the national interest.

He also regretted the absence of a rational political culture in Britain, so the issue could be discussed without fomenting class warfare. But what his article fomented was a furor around its author. He was accused of betraying the cause. People severed friendships with him. Raphael Samuel, guiding light of the History Workshop, was furious.

Canadian expatriate writer Lisa Appignanesi has been a friend and defender of Mr. Ignatieff since those days. In an interview in the kitchen of her Islington home, she recalls that “at the time of the miners strike, the purist left could not stand for any argument which said the miners might pragmatically be seen to be taking an ideologically self-immolatory position, that their leader wasn't close to God, that Thatcher [wasn't] a devil and so on.

A different interpretation of Mr. Ignatieff's behaviour comes from several of the friends he and Susan lost. As they saw it, with the birth of his first child, he wanted to become an idealized, famous father like his own had been. He wanted to distance himself from polarized British politics so he could achieve the profile and earnings of an establishment media figure.

Son Theo was born in 1984, and his sister, Sophie, in 1987. Soon after her birth, it became apparent that Michael's relationship with Susan was running into trouble.

But acquaintances of the couple noticed that Susan was increasingly despondent and they were getting hints from Mr. Ignatieff that he did not know how to handle it.

It is interesting — given Mr. Ignatieff's social-class meditations on the miners' strike — that when discussing Susan, who refused to be interviewed for this story, the first observation Britons usually make is that she is working-class. Canadians who know her never mention it.

She came from a blue-collar background. Her mother walked out on the family when Susan was 13. As the oldest of five children, she was expected to care for the younger ones. There were dark and troubled moments in her childhood. She was the only member of her school graduating class to go on to university.

When she became pregnant with Theo in 1983, she quit her job with the British Film Institute to be a stay-at-home mum, and thereafter tried hard — desperately hard, said several friends — to keep pace with her husband as his life dramatically changed.

One friend had the impression Susan was jealous because Michael had made a film with someone else rather than her. Others picked up on occasional comments from Michael that Susan increasingly resented the time he spent on work.

A woman friend was astonished to see Susan at a cocktail party two weeks after Sophie's birth. Asked why, she replied that she was determined to stay active in Michael's life. Another friend says Susan was angry with a lyrical newspaper article Mr. Ignatieff had written about watching her sleep — because the article was really about Michael, and she appeared only as an object.

In the late 1980s, on a summer's visit the Ignatieffs made to Canada, one chum from Michael's university days found Susan antisocial, and another thought they were both depressed and were dragging each other down.

Something else at this time was stirring in Michael Ignatieff's mind: his near obsession with exploring the intimate private recesses of family life in his quest for self-understanding. It has produced some of his most incomparably beautiful writing, caused some of the greatest pain to those close to him and is the most difficult thing about him to understand.

His academic and journalistic inquiries into human rights, violence, ethnic nationalism and the moral obligations of liberal democracies have brought him international acclaim as a public intellectual. But it is his fixation with family, the relationships between family members, all the minutiae of family life that leaves him publicly undressed.

It is a summer's afternoon in 1986. In Richmond in Quebec's Eastern Townships, he is following his Uncle Dima up the sloping hill above the St. Francis River to St. Andrew's Presbyterian cemetery. The old man and his nephew, visiting from London, pass one by one the solid Presbyterian names carved into marble until they come to the only two Russian names the graveyard contains.

They share the same black stone. “‘In loving memory, Count Paul Ignatieff, 1870-1945; Countess Natasha Ignatieff, 1877-1944.” Michael Ignatieff's grandparents.

Vladimir Ignatieff since then has joined his parents. As have Michael's three other Ignatieff uncles, his aunts, his mother, his father. And, he says, one dog. “Me, too, some day,” he writes in an e-mail.

In the August, 1984 — the summer of Michael Ignatieff's “good year” — there was a family gathering at the house in a village in Provence that George and Alison had bought in 1962 as their only permanent residence.

The older Ignatieffs were there. Andrew had flown in from the shanty barrios of Peru where he worked for the Canadian arm of Save the Children. Michael, Susan and baby Theo had come from London — making it the first time three generations of the family were gathered under one roof.

It was a taxing time. Alison had begun her descent into Alzheimer's. George, the all-powerful force in his sons' lives, was showing signs of frailty. There were raw emotions and difficult conversations as the family struggled with its psychological past, with the unfamiliarity of living together, with the pain of coming to terms with Alison's illness.

George, who had had no real childhood of his own, had little idea of what to do with fatherhood when it came to him. He could appear warm and affectionate, but found it difficult to convey his hopes and aspirations to his sons beyond declamations of grand dynastic expectations.

Michael said things that wounded his father. He accused him of crushing his mother's creativity and independence by taking over her life and making her subservient to his needs.

A year later, as Andrew would tell Sandra Martin for Saturday Night, he came home to Toronto from Peru for a visit, walked into a bookstore and saw the entire story of his family's summer laid out in an article Michael had written for the British literary magazine Granta.

Not long afterward, Andrew quit his job in Peru to return to Toronto to care for his parents, while Michael's career continued to flower in England — as a television host, newspaper commentator, author and screenplay-writer.

In early 1989, he came briefly to Toronto to spell Andrew off as caregiver — “‘once or twice a year, it's my turn” — and shortly afterward, Granta published “Deficits,” a deeply moving account of a son looking after his mother, with a forensically detailed description of Alison's deteriorating mental state.

There were family members — for example, Alison's sister, Charity Grant, and her brother, George Grant, and his wife, Sheila — who could never bring themselves to forgive Michael for having publicly exposed his intensely private mother.

Even the film he made with Hugh Brody, Nineteen-Nineteen, has a scene where the Paul Scofield character, a Russian, angrily tears family photos from the wall. George was delighted when he saw a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and recognized the photos used in the film as those of his own family. He didn't twig to the subtext.

Two years after George died, Vancouver filmmaker Colin Browne made a National Film Board documentary about fathers and sons, and interviewed Michael. He is on a sofa with Theo sitting silently beside him, his eyes fixed on Michael as he speaks, while Sophie clambers along the back of the sofa at her father's shoulder, oblivious to what's going on.

“I have reworked our relationship again and again,” he said, “and now that I know him better, I think I can understand how he can have this wonderful, vulnerable childlike heart, which is protected by such a ruthless, cold, hard, ambitious exterior. He is so much like my father in this way. Neither one of them had any idea of the impact they had on other people.

Alison Ignatieff died in 1992, and the following year Scar Tissue, the second novel, appeared. This time, the critics were almost universal in their praise, the work was short-listed for the Booker Prize and turned into a television drama for which Mr. Ignatieff collaborated on the screenplay.

It is a first-person narrative of a man who cares for a mother with Alzheimer's and whose brother is intellectually and emotionally detached from her illness. Many reviewers described the novel as autobiographical, but only in a handful of instances was Mr. Ignatieff quoted as saying that Andrew, not he, was Alison's primary caregiver. “I was the absent brother,” he told The Guardian.

He also has said the family proclivity for Alzheimer's — his maternal grandmother was afflicted by it, too — frightens him and that, to ward it off, he stands on his head so that blood will rush into his brain.

As a footnote, Mr. Ignatieff's first-person character in the novel has a wife who resents the time he spends away from home caring for his mother. Their marriage collapses when the character has an affair with his mother's nurse. He tells his wife about it, and she orders him out of the house.

Shortly afterward, a British newspaper gossip columnist trumpeted that Michael Ignatieff — “the patron saint of the New Man” — had left his wife for another woman.

Four years later, the Ignatieffs divorced, and accounts of the marriage's disintegration are uniform: The separation proceedings were poisonous, the legal bills huge. Michael told friends of having to pay several thousand pounds just to vary his visiting time with Sophie by one hour.

The wedding reception was held in the third-floor apartment of a renovated warehouse — the entire third-floor: vast amounts of bare floors, white walls, groupings of modern furniture in pink and green — in hip, east-end Hoxton, where the two had been living together for three years.

One guest recalls walking into the reception and being stopped cold by the realization that almost everyone present was famous: novelists Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, husband and wife writers Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Monty Python's Michael Palin, the Berlin Philharmonic's Simon Rattle, film producer Lynda Myles, theatre and opera director Jonathan Miller, literary maven Lisa Appignanesi, Prospect editor David Goodhart, and on and on. The intellectual and artistic haute monde of London.

What also would have been apparent to the 50 or so guests, brother Andrew among them, was that Mr. Ignatieff had emerged from the dark cave of his soul, and was happy, the reason being the pleasant, fair-haired woman standing at his side.

Budapest-born Ms. Zsohar, a few months younger than her new husband, had been head of publicity at the BBC before embarking on a career as a freelance publicist. Her skill at nurturing sensitive media personalities was renowned — she had done a superb job with Mr. Palin and his Hemingway Adventure travel series, and had handled the promotion of one of Mr. Ignatieff's BBC documentaries.

She is described by those who know her as intelligent, funny, warm, kind, caring, someone who can be called with a personal crisis in the middle of the night and offer excellent advice.

Above all, she is characterized as a woman who knows exactly who she is and what she wants to do — a very clear person with a firm personality who is unswerving in her affection for her husband.

A long-time friend feels that Mr. Ignatieff “has found his life partner.” They are a dyad. He constantly consults her, and has credited her with eradicating his chronic back pain, the result of two car accidents.

Andrew Ignatieff gave a speech at their wedding, thanking her for creating a space where he and Michael could finally meet as brothers. He has told friends in Toronto that he feels Michael has changed: the ruthlessness has gone.

Ms. Zsohar came into Mr. Ignatieff's life at the right moment. After his 15-year rise from the History Workshop collective, he was starting to come down.

On the crest of hard work, discipline and remarkable talent, he had travelled an awesome distance. University research fellows — even from Cambridge — just do not become television hosts, columnists for national newspapers and leading magazines on two continents, authors, documentary makers, screenwriters, war correspondents and members of international commissions on violence and peace, all more or less at the same time. Mr. Ignatieff did.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ensuing violent eruptions of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans and elsewhere propelled him on to the global stage as an eloquent and forceful proponent of the obligations of liberal democracies to intervene in failed states to protect their inhabitants.

In television documentaries and books — Blood and Belonging, Guardians of Chaos, The Warrior's Honour, Virtual War, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, The Trial of Freedom and The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror — he explored the new violence of ethnicity and terror and the failure of traditional multilateral means to contain them.

The Observer gave him a weekly column. He was invited to give lectures at leading U.S. and Canadian universities and offered visiting professorships at the London School of Economics and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Blood and Belonging in 1993 won the $50,000 Lionel Gelber Prize for foreign-policy writing, beating out Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy.

He became a celebrity. When Salman Rushdie, still in hiding from Ayatollah Khomeini's execution fatwa, wrote his brilliant defence of free speech in 1990 to be read at a public assembly in London, Mr. Ignatieff was asked to preside at the event. And when Mr. Rushdie came out of hiding, he was the first TV host to interview the author.

He was referred to in print as “the elegant television pundit Michael Ignatieff,” whose wife had an excellent recipe for fish pasta (so much for Susan's intellectual status). He was photographed in a pink suit for the cover of British GQ, and included in the lists of celebrities' birthdays published annually by The Times and The Guardian.

He was one of the first members of Groucho's, the fashionable Soho club for writers and editors that opened in 1985 — although he had a reputation for being shirty with the staff when service fell beneath his standards.

The attacks, according to Lisa Appignanesi, hurt him. “Once Michael had made the decision to opt for the freelance life, he worked hard at it, and success engendered a certain amount of envy from those who hadn't been quite so successful, and had been left behind.

At the same time, the fashion for earnest journalism popular in Britain in the 1980s was giving way to something cheekier, less reverential. Even as his media fame was still blossoming, outlets for his work were being pruned. He lost his column with The Observer in 1993; more precisely, he surrendered it before it could be taken away.

In the mid-1990s, he told me, his career as a television host stalled. He had a fresh mind, an engaging curiosity; he was easy to work with; he had the slightly larger head that cameras flatter. But he never broke through in the medium. In fact, to some degree, his television celebrity was more a product of media chatter — his documentaries were praised by newspaper critics — than a reflection of the ratings. Some of his audiences were so small, they barely registered.

A BBC executive says he never learned to let to let go in front of the camera, to project a strong personality and distinct voice, and the people who directed him didn't know how to fix it.

A quarter-century after leaving Harvard convinced that it was overrated, pompous and arrogant, he was back — as director of the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy, an academic think tank tucked beneath the umbrella of Harvard's prestigious Kennedy School of Government.

Just two years old, the centre and its acting director — lawyer, journalist and human-rights activist Samantha Power — were looking for someone who would generate enough of a buzz to make America's government, media and academic elites take note.

Prof. Power did not want the position; she disliked administration. But she liked Mr. Ignatieff — his writing (sitting in England, he had noticed his books starting to turn up on course reading lists in northeastern U.S. universities), his thinking and his style.

He turned out to be made for the job. By every account, his four years at the Carr were among the most satisfying and exciting of his life. Within months of his arrival, he grabbed media attention with a colloquium on American exceptionalism: an exploration of America's long-standing practice of exempting itself from international human-rights obligations and international legal frameworks.

He turned the Carr into a dynamic intellectual salon, crackling with scholarly electricity in all directions — looking at human rights in the context of a global responsibility to protect, philosophically re-examining the social contract, investigating the failure of civil society in places such as the Balkans, analyzing how the strong use power on behalf of the weak.

“His understanding of the American landscape, his ability to deal with the military, with the media, with students, it was amazing,” Prof. Power says.

The distant, aloof and patrician Michael Ignatieff of London days seemed a man transformed. He also seemed a man bent on undoing everything he had hated about Harvard.

To the 120 students studying at the centre, he became the adored Harrison Ford character out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. They rated his lectures as mind-altering. His colleagues — particularly, as usual, women — found him gregarious, relaxed, playful, thoughtful, a ready friend and mentor.

The gruff, Pulitzer Prize-winning Prof. Power says their social relationship was based on three Bs: baseball, bottles and boys. They talked about the Boston Red Sox, of whom she is a fanatic supporter; they spent evenings together ‘“yelling and laughing” over bottles of wine, and she found him a kind and sympathetic confidant when it came to affairs of the heart.

Fernande Raine, the centre's executive director, says Mr. Ignatieff was someone she instantly trusted, someone who cared about the people he worked with and their personal lives and families, someone who didn't believe in “a hierarchical totem pole” — no court of the Manchu emperors.

Amir Attaran, now Canada research chair in law, population health, and global development policy at the University of Ottawa, was a research fellow at the Kennedy School during Mr. Ignatieff's time at the Carr.

He ran afoul of an influential faculty member and the school's administration over a line of academic inquiry he insisted on pursuing, and found himself about to be booted out.

He brought his troubles to Mr. Ignatieff, who gave him office space and mentoring support until he could find another academic home. “Michael stuck up for me against some extremely nasty attacks,” Prof. Attaran says.

And then in early 2003, he did something that not only shocked his colleagues but brought down on his head the condemnation of the entire U.S. left. In a Sunday magazine essay in The New York Times, he declared his support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It was 1984 all over again: the British miners strike, the New Statesman article, the outrage of the History Workshop and the North London left — this time, writ large on a global stage.

Instead, he eloquently defended himself, writing in The Guardian, for example: “Now that combat has commenced, those, like me, who support the war need to be honest enough to address some painful questions. Who wants to live in a world where there are no stable rules for the use of force by states? Not me. Who wants to live in a world ruled by the military power of the strong? Not me. How will we oblige American military hegemony to pay ‘decent respect to the opinions of mankind'? I don't know.

His support of the Iraq invasion would have appalled his father, but his arguments won him at least grudging respect from many who disagreed with him.

What had happened? This ending didn't fit the pattern. There were no visible Aztecs around, his career at the Carr seemed anything but stalled, his status as a public intellectual in the United States had become nothing short of august.

He has said on other occasions that he felt in his soul it was time to come home, that he had always intended to enter public life one day. And there were those four words in his UCC yearbook.

Over lunch in London's Richoux Restaurant Gwyn Prins, the global security expert, hints that Mr. Ignatieff had a quite deliberate plan in mind: He wants to bring his ideas to where the action is.

“His writings would be of no public significance, if he had continued his academic and literary career in Canada or abroad,” Prof. Smith writes in his new book, Ignatieff's World: A Liberal Leader for the Twenty-first Century, to be published next month.

The venue was Il Posto in Toronto's Yorkville district, a restaurant favoured by Liberals of a certain stature. One night early in June, 2005, Senator David Smith, backroom eminence, had dinner with Mr. Ignatieff and Ms. Zsohar. Also present was lawyer Dan Brock, one of a small group of Liberals who had been working for more than a year to bring Mr. Ignatieff into politics.

As the meal ran its course, it was clear to everyone at the table that Mr. Ignatieff's decision about running for Parliament had been made, and that the conversation was about the nuts-and-bolts logistics of his candidacy — although for media and public consumption, it would be said for the rest of the summer that he had yet to make up his mind.

“The thought was that, if we formed a government, he wasn't looking for any promises, but he'd have a very good shot at being a minister.

On the night of Jan. 23, Michael Ignatieff — after a slightly dodgy acquisition of the nomination in Etobicoke-Lakeshore (all possible opponents were declared ineligible) — was elected to Parliament. But his party was pushed out of government, and Mr. Martin announced that he would step down as party leader.

On April 7, Mr. Ignatieff declared his candidacy for the leadership, bounding almost immediately to the front of the pack — where he has remained — with flocks of MPs and party notables handing him their endorsement, and many party members handing him cheques.

Former Ontario premier David Peterson, together with Dorothy Davey, wife of legendary Liberal organizer Keith Davey, held a fundraiser for him. When Toronto's Liberal elite gathered for super-mandarin Bernie Ostry's funeral in May, Mr. Ignatieff's name — Iggy, for the headline writers — was on every lip.

I had breakfast at the summer's outset with political journalist Peter C. Newman, who talked over bagels in his north Toronto apartment about how politicians who become accepted into the mythology of the country have nicknames bestowed on them: Rex for Mackenzie King. Mike Pearson. Dief for John Diefenbaker. PET for Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Poor Andrew Ignatieff. Written out of the script again. Or maybe it's his revenge — Iggy was the nickname Andrew loathed at Upper Canada College. It was never Michael's.

As the campaign has progressed, Mr. Ignatieff's policy announcements — as well as his parliamentary vote with the Conservative government to extend Canada's military mission in Afghanistan — have regularly made front-page news. In July, the media waited eagerly for his return from a visit to his mother-in-law in Budapest, so they could record his views on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.

Efforts by his opponents — most vigorously by old pal Bob Rae — to make an issue of Mr. Ignatieff's absence from the country throughout most of his adult life have not noticeably furrowed party members' brows. Yet, as recently as 2000, when he gave the CBC Massey Lectures on the development of human rights in Canada, he acknowledged being “a Martian outsider” who had not resided here “since 1969,” overlooking, for some reason, the two years spent at UBC.

This week, Maclean's magazine, claiming an “exclusive,” trumpets as its cover story “The Ignatieff Manifesto — The most intriguing new face in Canadian politics reveals how he'd change the country.” Mr. Ignatieff wrote the article himself.

In June, he travelled to the blue-collar Eastern Ontario city of Cornwall to meet a shirtsleeve crowd of Liberals in the Knights of Columbus hall. He came in, wearing a tight, European-cut suit with all three buttons of the jacket done up, and looking as out of place as a Harvard professor at a barn dance.

Growing up in Uncle Vladimir's barns? Michael Ignatieff grew up in diplomatic residences in New York and Europe and the dorm at Upper Canada College. His uncle's dairy farm he visited in the summer.

Yes, on his father's side, he is the son and grandson of immigrants. But the father who started with nothing and became an ambassador was the son of Russian aristocracy, attended private schools and went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. And on his mother's side, Mr. Ignatieff is the grandson and great-grandson of a Canadian intellectual dynasty.

He did become a Liberal in 1965 — but left the country four years later. And, as for his children, he has had difficulty in the past gaining access to them. And he can deny access — turning down my request to talk to them, saying he did not want his political career to intrude on their privacy.

Theo, now 22, has followed his father to Toronto. He lived for a while with his Uncle Andrew but is now on his own and works in a restaurant. Like many men his age, he is trying to decide what to do with his life, and has been described as brooding and serious — like Michael.

In contrast, sister Sophie, 19, is characterized as tough, independent, spontaneous and the spitting image, both physically and in many of her mannerisms, of her grandmother, Alison. She is about to enter the University of Edinburgh.

So, that's what it means to be Michael Ignatieff. Is he, to quote Prof. Denis Smith's book title, a Liberal leader for the 21st century? That's for his party to decide, of course.

He tells me he wants to connect with the romantic vision of the country that his great-grandfather held, that he wants to be a nation-builder like George Monro Grant.

A few days ago, I went to hear him speak to Liberals in the Georgian Bay town of Owen Sound. He wore the same suit as he had in Cornwall, but the jacket was unbuttoned and he had lost the tie. This was a different Michael Ignatieff from the one I had seen in Cornwall, without a breath of condescension, gimmickry or banality in his talk — maybe just a couple of dropped g's.

He delivered an articulate, engaging summary of his campaign ideas. He talked knowledgeably with his rural audience about combatting U.S. and European agricultural subsidies, about the need for a national food policy, about the environment.

I asked two women I was sitting with what they thought. Neither liked the suit. One said he went on five minutes too long. Both said they would vote for him as leader. The only candidate to come to town, he was the main story on the front page of the next day's Owen Sound Sun-Times.

When you look at Michael Ignatieff's life, you can't help but be impressed by his accomplishments and by the discipline he has imposed on himself to achieve them. He hasn't drifted for a moment since he was the authoritarian prig at Upper Canada College walking around with Paris Match tucked under his arm.

Despite what he may say to the contrary, he has made his life into an effective vehicle that travels from Point A to Point B. When he has recognized endings, he has ended things — wham-bam — and gone on to something else, at times reinventing himself dramatically in the process. Not a lot of people do that.

I glance around the office and notice that, despite a few personal touches — he brought in his own desk and a wall of books, there's a kind of detached look to it. Like it's a way station on the road to somewhere else.

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