We all know people who have led charmed lives, either by grace of high birth or, perhaps compensating for one’s birth, by extraordinary effort. Certainly, luck plays no small role in these cases, for even the most fortuitous beginning requires constant attention.

Raymond Klibansky, born in 1905, is still leading such a life. His recently published autobiography (more accurately, an extended conversation with a former pupil originally prepared for radio broadcast in Canada) is a stunning testimony to how an individual can tap some of our civilization’s deepest intellectual roots and play significant roles in our time’s most demanding conflicts, all the while maintaining contact with some of the leading players of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history.

Klibansky is probably best known for a collaboration with art historians Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl on Saturn and Melancholy, written in German during the 1930s but only published in English in the mid-1960s. Revised and expanded editions have appeared in French and German. It has been acclaimed as a classic in the history of ideas, medicine, art, philosophy and science, but inexplicably the English edition has been out of print for years. The chapter in the autobiography dedicated to “Saturn’s Children,” especially when read in tandem with Klibansky’s 1989 preface to the French and German editions, offers fresh perspectives on melancholy as well as on the intricate genesis and reception of the book.

Needless to say, the author’s connections with the leading lights of the Warburg circle