Lino Briguglio: No man is an island 

edited by Marie Briguglio and Michael Briguglio,

published by Kite, 2024

A few years ago, I had the pleasure and honour of putting together a book about the lifework of Guido Lanfranco. The title I chose was The Examined Life, my reasoning being that Lanfranco had followed, and zealously at that, Socrates’ adage about a life worth living.

Lino Briguglio: No man is an island is a book about a fellow zealot. Edited by his children Marie and Michael – both colleagues and friends of mine, I must disclose – it brings together over 100 vignettes by people as diverse as Sammy Meilaq and Kenneth Wain, Lillian Sciberras and Philip Fenech.

The result, while necessarily and prescriptively pointillistic, is a compelling image, first, of the man himself and, second, of the academic, artistic and political currents of post-Independence Malta.

Lino Briguglio (b. 1944) is by profession an economist. In academia, he is best known as a world specialist on islands and small states. A good part of his output is premised on the idea that size matters – thus his work on the vulnerability, but equally the resilience, of small island states. They are places where geography, society, politics and the economy come together in a rather distinctive way.

The book's cover

Over the years, Briguglio has toured the world with his paradigm that smallness can and often does call into question economic models brought up in more spacious homes.

In this, he was often in the good company of fellow small-states specialist Godfrey Baldacchino, who is a contributor to this volume. Internationally, Briguglio’s reputation rests on a solid and sustained productivity, and he remains one of the best published and most widely cited members of the University of Malta. Simply put, if he were a tenor, he would be Joseph Calleja.  

As an artist, I don’t suppose Briguglio would shake his maulstick at me if I called him an amateur. By which I mean, not that he is incompetent, but that art is for him a matter purely of the heart.

In more ways than one, as it happens, because one of the drifts of the book is that his love for his late wife Marie was nurtured in part in their mutual intensity for painting.

One of the best-produced local publications I’ve come across in a long time

This passion and its tangible outcome were in turn shared within a circle of contemporary artists and art pundits, and it is no surprise that Noel Galea Bason, Vince Briffa, Dominic Cutajar and Joe Friggieri are among the contributors with stories to tell.

Briguglio’s paintings (typically landscapes and genre) and playful sketches make a sustained appearance in this profusely illustrated book. They help make it one of the best-produced local publications I’ve come across in a long time.

As a politician in the narrow sense of the word, Briguglio was short-lived. I am old enough to remember the Partit Demokratiku Malti (PDM), routinely known at the time as “il-partit ta’ Briguglio”. It was his raspberry at a Labour government that, while still strong and entirely electable, had hopelessly lost the plot. In a fiercely bipartisan setting, he had the backbone, to borrow a line from Dominic Fenech’s piece, to “pursue his convictions with open options”.

A cartoon featuring Lino Briguglio

Public ridicule was not the only risk. Nor was it the biggest, as his own book L-elementi kriminali u vjolenti fi ħdan il-Partit Laburista (1986) had described. In terms of success at the polls, the PDM was at best a footnote. But the various pieces in this book by politicians and public commentators show that electoral jackpot is but one type of political impact.

Briguglio’s tireless contributions to the press, his informal role as a creator and enabler of political ideas, and his earlier life as a protagonist of student politics at the (then Royal) University of Malta, combined to make him a key player in the political life of this country in the decades following Independence.

While not deep enough in time to be among his inner circle, I have often met Lino at university. He has the self-deprecating twinkle of one who has seen it all and has nothing to prove, but also of one who has spent considerable time in smoke-filled, boozy rooms.

Among a certain generation, the parties thrown by the Briguglios are the stuff of legend. Their home in Sliema was a kind of L-Għarix for artists and intellectuals whose homage to tradition was decidedly two-fingered.

Whether or not the message prevailed is a moot point. Most certainly though, Lino Briguglio deserves this quite wonderful Festschrift for having tried.