The writer, historian and former politician tells Peter Stanford that he is the child of both his mother’s unbelief and his father’s Russian Orthodoxy.

Michael Ignatieff can’t now quite recall the subject of the lecture he was invited to give – as a writer, journalist, academic and, briefly, a politician in his native Canada – at a weekend festival in Utrecht in 2017. What he can remember from his time in the Dutch city, however, is the assembled choirs, the major part of the programme, that over two days sang their way through all 150 of the Psalms.

“There was something very extraordinary about the experience,” he tells me as he sits behind his desk in Vienna, where this 74-year-old public intellectual now teaches at the Central European University. “It set me off trying to understand why religious language comforts the unbeliever.” In other words, him. Though he had been raised in the faith in the Russian Orthodox Church, discovering David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as an 18-year-old, he says, had seen him blown away from formal faith attachment by the “detonating force” of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher’s arguments.

That weekend in Utrecht, where religious and secular threads within him got tangled, is a starting point for his latest book. “Afterwards, I just followed my nose,” he says, with his search becoming more urgent with the arrival of Covid that left so many in need of comfort from wherever they could get it, as death and the fear of death stalked the globe. The result of his labours is On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times, out this month, and a BBC?Radio 4 Book of the Week in February. The word in the title, though, I point out, is “consolation”, not “comfort”, which he had used when first talking about the impact of listening to the Psalms.