This book is a festschrift for Lino Briguglio on his 80th birthday, collected and organised by his two children, Marie and Michael, honouring also the memory of his wife and their mother Marie, whose death was too sudden for the three of them to give her the due appreciation.
I must be one of the very few people in the media from 1970 onwards who have never met Lino Briguglio in person. He and I moved in parallel existences in this small island at a time of great happenings. But never met.
He and I were both at the Royal University of Malta and I had even taken Economics at Intermediate level but that was with Salvino Busuttil before Briguglio joined.
It might seem strange but although some of my friends were gravitating around the multiple Briguglio family I remained on the sidelines. Only at the very end his daughter-in-law came to work with us for a very short period.
The format of the book, short appraisals and memories by those who knew him at the varied stages of his life, cannot replace either a full biography or an autobiography.
I find for instance that the first section, which deals with his incipient steps in politics, to be extra weak. Evarist Bartolo, for instance, the man who probably knows where the bodies are buried, does not feature among the writers.
I can only speak of what I saw from a distance.
After the first term of the Mintoff administration, after the battles with the British government leading up to the British leaving Malta in 1979, and before that the declaration of the Republic, a new wave of Maltese intellectuals came to the fore, left-wing and articulate, Briguglio among them.
But the Mintoff core was suspicious of the new entrants. I distinctly remember the anger within this core, in other words Mintoff and those around him, as Briguglio became more and more popular. He had to be stopped. And he was stopped and kicked out of the party.
The book contains a rare article by Michael Frendo, former Minister and Speaker, who writes about the Graduation ceremony in 1977, during which he spoke on behalf of the students and courageously condemned the government, which had forced the medical students to go abroad to continue their studies. At which point President Anton Buttigieg and Minister Philip Muscat left the ceremony in protest.
In his article, I believe for the first time, Dr Frendo mentions by name the thug who went up to attack him. Ever since he left politics and joined the bank, Dr Frendo has been silent.
The Mintoff repression led some to stop, like Briguglio. Others opted to try and set up a third party, with negligible results. Others, like Peppi Azzopardi, set up alternative groupings, like the Tan-Numri Group, which then led to Alternattiva. Peppi's account in the book is rather skimpy. So thanks to Dom's intransigence, what we today would call civil society, drifted away from the MLP and has not been recovered back.
I ask myself what would have happened if Briguglio remained in the party but recognise this was impossible.
Anyway, as a result of Mintoff's hostility Briguglio moved away from the party and reinvented himself at the university. This was a very intelligent move which turned him into an intensely effective coordinator of diverse students.
It was during this time that he became a colleague of Egyptian economist, M. Metwally, whose book on the Maltese economy under Mintoff proved beyond doubt that the Maltese economy had deteriorated under Mintoff, rather than become the best in Europe as Labour always brags.
It is a matter of pride for me that we at il-Hajja Press, with outmoded machinery, succeeded to print the book no one dared touch.
Then, some years later, Briguglio, almost singlehandedly, created "ex nihilo" the University in Gozo. At first, no one seemed to believe that this could be done. But they managed against terrible odds.
People who never dreamed of going to university were persuaded to do so. The book contains a beautiful article by the mayor of San Lawrenz, Noel Formosa, in this sense.
Then the next two reincarnations: the internationally-acclaimed Islands and Small States Institute. And his share in the drawing up of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which led to the awarding of the Nobel peace prize, the only Maltese person who can claim to have shared the Nobel peace prize.
Above anything else the book is testimony to Briguglio's human character - the jovial character who used to invite people to parties at his house in Sliema, the person who helped one and all without any gain, for free. He encouraged those who were losing hope.
It is good to know that there are people like that and that some do come back to thank him.