In War and an Irish Town, his account of the early years of the Troubles, Eamonn McCann recalls a front-page headline from the Derry Journal in the summer of 1972: “HUME CALLS FOR RESTRAINT.” According to McCann, one local militant greeted John Hume’s exhortation with a sigh: “Now there’s a turn-up for the books.”

For admirers and detractors alike, Hume epitomized caution, restraint and moderation, throughout a conflict shaped by more assertive and unyielding political actors. Lord Cameron’s report on the disturbances of 1968–69 singled out Hume as the Platonic ideal of a moderate reformer, some time before the Irish Republican Army (IRA) became the symbol of revolutionary intransigence. Thirty years later, Hume would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in bringing about the Good Friday Agreement.

Throughout those decades, Hume assumed an international profile many prime ministers would have envied — despite being a regional politician from the UK’s smallest part. He did so without holding any executive office, apart from a few months in the 1970s, or even playing the role of kingmaker at Westminster, as Northern Irish politicians have sometimes been known to do. He was an influential figure in Brussels and had the ear of US congressmen like Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. When Bill Clinton decided to invest some political capital in the Northern Irish peace process, he relied upon Hume as a guide to the local market.