My Jewish grandfather had no liking for Judaism or indeed for any form of religion. He also believed that the Jews, throughout their history, had brought many of their troubles upon themselves by their clannishness and their religious obduracy. He himself had married a Jewess, but he wished that his children, all three of whom were daughters, should marry gentiles. As usually happened in the family, his wishes prevailed. My mother was the eldest daughter and I was her only child.

Neither my mother nor my father was of English descent. My mother's family came from Holland and my father was French-Swiss. There is a village called Ayer, across the border from Chamonix, from which our name may have been derived. My father had a theory that our ancestors were Spanish counts, but if he had any evidence for this he did not pass it on to me.... The only member of my family of whom I have been able to discover any record in the Swiss biographical dictionary is my grandfather, Nicolas Louis Cyprien Ayer, who was born at Sorens in the canton of Fribourg as long ago as 1825. After a stormy career as schoolmaster, political propagandist and editor of radical journals, he achieved at the age of forty-one what would nowadays be the remarkable feat of being appointed simultaneously to professorships of French, Geography and Economics at the Academy of Neuchatel.

When I was about eighteen months old my father went bankrupt. He had been speculating in foreign exchange and in spite of his knowledge of finance was constantly at fault in his predictions. He borrowed from moneylenders to make good his losses, speculated more heavily as his debts increased, and then had to borrow again. It ended with the moneylenders putting bailiffs in our flat. Rothschilds did not like their employees to speculate, even successfully, and my father lost his position and Alfred Rothschild's favour. It fell to my grandfather to rescue us. My grandfather paid his son-in-law's debts but never really forgave him. Like many Jews, he had a very high standard of probity in business, and he regarded bankruptcy as a form of theft. My father's motives in proposing to my mother also became suspect to him. He offered to support my mother and me, if she wanted to separate from her husband, but she said that she did not. This may have been a disappointment to my grandfather, but his sense of responsibility prevailed and he established my father in some business in Brussels, where we went to live. I have no recollection of this period and never learned what my father's business was. It came to an end anyway with the outbreak of the first world war, which sent us back to England. My father, who was a naturalized British citizen, tried to get a commission in the army, but at forty-seven was considered to be too old. When he suggested that even at his age his knowledge of French might be put to some good use, he was told that "All our officers speak French." My grandfather then bought him a partnership in a firm of timber merchants. We took a small house in Kilburn, a rather poor quarter of north London. We lived modestly but were not too poor to employ a maid of all work, of whom I was very fond. My father never recovered from this set-back. He did not like the timber business and I doubt if he was very good at it.

I was a solitary boy but not lonely. I collected stamps, spending many hours identifying them in the catalogue and finding the right places for them in my album and I also collected cigarette cards. I remember having a complete set of Allied generals and of actors and of cards containing tidbits of information such as what was meant by the Plimsoll Line. I had a model railway and a series of Meccano sets which gave me more trouble than pleasure. I tried conscientiously to follow the instructions but found it very difficult. I have never been at all good with my hands and to this day cannot mend a fuse or put up a shelf or master even the simplest piece of machinery. I am slightly ashamed of this incapacity, but perhaps not so much as I should be. I think that I could have made a greater effort to overcome it. To the extent that it leads other people to do things for me, it convicts me of some self-indulgence.

I supported Middlesex at cricket, since their headquarters at Lord's was close to where I lived, and chose Tottenham Hotspur as my soccer team for no better reason than that they were a London team and I liked the bravado of their name. I began to take an interest in their fortunes in the season of igig-20 when they won promotion from the second to the first division, and became their devoted adherent in the following season when they won the Football Association Cup. I have remained so ever since.

While I was a schoolboy, my interest in professional football was nourished almost entirely by the reports of matches in the newspapers. I very seldom had a chance to see it played. Perhaps in consequence, I had at that time an even greater love for cricket. Wisden's cricketing annual became almost my favourite reading, and I could have named what I took to be the strongest eleven for every one of the sixteen first class counties. I bought or was given books with illustrations of famous cricketers, and took an interest in the history of the game, making a collection of Wisdens, some of which went back to years before I was born. I had fantasies of playing for England as an all-rounder, which showed a surprising resistance to their manifest improbability. My grandfather indulged them to the extent of paying in two successive years for me to have special coaching at Lord's. He once came to watch me and characteristically took the professional aside to ask him if I was ever likely to be any good at the game. The professional frankly told him that I had no chance at all, but my grandfather was kind enough not to report this to me until I had realized it for myself.

I went to Eton in the autumn of 1923, when I was not quite thirteen years old. As a scholar I was put straight into the upper school with boys who were mostly two or three years older than myself. The number of King's Scholars, as we were officially called, because we inherited our status from the foundation of the school in the fourteenth century by King Henry VI, was kept at 70, out of a total, in my time, of about 1,100 boys. The scholars were housed together in a mixture of old and relatively new buildings, known in its entirety as College, and were therefore themselves known as Collegers. They were in the charge of a master called the Master in College, and there was also a matron who was supposed to look after their health. The other boys, who were called Oppidans, from the Latin word for 'townsmen', were dispersed in houses within walking distance of the schoolrooms, at an average of something over forty boys to a house. Traditionally, the Oppidans despised the Collegers, who tended to come from a lower social stratum, and spoke of them as Tugs, because they were believed to engage in tugs of war for the few pieces of mutton which was all that they were given to eat. By the time that I went there this prejudice had very largely, if not entirely, disappeared and our diet, if far from luxurious, was anyhow less scanty and more varied; but the nickname remained...

Life at Eton in the nineteen-twenties looked back very much to the previous century, especially in its outward trappings. We still wore black silk top-hats to go to classes and on any walks that took us beyond a particular landmark in the neighbourhood of the school. If you met a master in the course of such a walk you were supposed to touch your hat to him and he was supposed to acknowledge the salute. Collegers wore long black gowns not only in class but at the meals which they took in the ancient college hall. In chapel they wore white surplices. The smaller boys, who had not yet grown to the height of five feet four inches, were dressed in the same sort of outfit as we had worn on Sundays at Ascham. The hard white collars were not very comfortable, especially when the back stud came loose, but one got used to them. I remained in jackets, as it was called, for about three years. Those who had reached the prescribed height wore black suits of morning tails with white shirts, stiff turned-down collars and white ties tucked into them. In winter we wore black overcoats of some regulation pattern. Members of sixth form, which consisted of the first ten Collegers and the first ten Oppidans in the school order, and

members of the Eton Society, a small self-perpetuating oligarchy, more familiarly known as Pop, wore stick-up collars and white bow-ties. The members of Pop also had the privileges, denied to other boys, of wearing coloured waistcoats, sponge-bag trousers, braid on their tail-coats, flowers in their button-holes and sealing wax on their top-hats, besides having the exclusive right to carry their umbrellas rolled and walk arm in arm with anyone they chose.

The beatings, especially when they were performed by hefty athletes, were very painful but one was expected to bear them without crying out or flinching, and to say good-night, when one had resumed one's gown, without a quiver in one's voice. I managed to do this, not because I was particularly courageous, but because of the hatred which I felt for what seemed to me oppression.

One of the boys who beat me was Quintin Hogg, who displayed what seemed to me a more than judicial severity in the performance of the exercise. I have long since ceased to bear him any grudge for this, and though I share neither his political views nor his enthusiasm for the Christian religion, our relations in later life have always been friendly. He was a ferocious player of the Wall game and a brilliant classical scholar both at Eton and at Oxford. Another of my executioners was Freddie Coleridge, not, I now think, an ill-natured boy but an athletic conformist, who honestly believed that bumptious little boys should be forcibly put down. Returning to Eton as a master, he came to be Lower Master and Vice-Provost, and not surprisingly Chairman of the local Conservative party. Another was Anthony Wagner, the present Garter King at Arms in the College of Heralds. He was nothing of an athlete and summoned three of us the following night to apologize for not having beaten us harder. I feared that he was going to try again, but he was content to ask us to take the will for the deed. At that time he was a Jacobite and in some formula involving the royal family, which he had to pronounce as Captain of the School, he once substituted the name 'Rupert' for 'George', Prince Rupert of Bavaria being then the Stuart pretender to the English throne.

The sixth-formers could administer milder punishments, a favourite one being to set the offender a subject for an epigram. I quite enjoyed composing these epigrams, except that it encroached on the time which one needed to do one's ordinary work. The same was true of the punishments imposed by the assistant masters, which nearly always took the form of making one write out lines of Latin verse. If an assistant master wanted a boy to be beaten for idleness or showing disrespect, he had to send him to the headmaster, or to the lower master, in the case of a boy in the lower school. Beatings by the headmaster were ceremonious affairs. They were witnessed by two sixth-formers, called the praepostors, whose duty it also was to go round the divisions and summon offenders for judgement. I suppose that the praepostors were there to prevent the headmaster from carrying the punishment to excess, though I have not found any record of their actually intervening. The culprit was brought in with his trousers lowered and held down over the flogging block by a porter, who seemed to be specially employed for this purpose. The headmaster then plied the birch, usually administering not less than six strokes. I witnessed one such birching and was glad that I never had to suffer it. Dr Alington was a vigorous man, but, to do him credit, he did not seem to relish the performance. Eton had progressed a little since the days of its most famous headmaster Dr Keate, who once mistook his confirmation class for a batch of offenders and when they protested flogged them all the harder for their impiety. His moral teaching was epitomized in his saying: "Boys, be pure in heart. If you are not pure in heart, I'll flog you."

I disapproved of corporal punishment, not only when it was inflicted on me, and when I was in Sixth Form both refused to beat anyone myself and, when others did it, made a rather feeble protest by walking out of the room.

Another friend whom I made was Randolph Churchill, an Oppidan of my own age who did not appear to have many friends at Eton. It may have been partly that which drew us together. He was a remarkably good-looking boy, who shared my interest in ideas which were not directly related to our work in school. I remember his enthusiasm for Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, which I still think a marvelously funny book. He had a great deal of charm and had not then developed the arrogance which made him difficult company in his later years. We remained friends during the brief time that he spent at Oxford but afterwards saw little of each other. On the rare occasions when we did meet, I often found him irritating, especially when he insisted on my having confessed to him to being a member of the Communist Party, a proposition which was false on both counts, but I never wholly lost my early affection for him.

I got on well enough with most of the boys in a superficial way, and there were two among them with whom my relations were quite close. One of them was a boy called David Hedley, in my junior election, a year or so younger than myself, with whom I made friends very soon after he came to College. He was a fair, sturdy boy, who was good both at work and games. He won the Newcastle Scholarship in my last year, defeating all the classicists in my election as well as his; we played together for College in the Field game, the Wall game and at soccer; he was my tennis partner in the doubles tournament which we won, and he got his school colours for rugby football. After I left, he was elected to Pop, perhaps automatically as Captain of the School, and was reported to enjoy its privileges, though we both had affected to despise such things. No doubt if they had elected me I should have been equally pleased. His father was a prosperous doctor and he had an elder brother in College, also a good athlete though not so good a scholar, who returned to Eton as a master. I once went to lunch with his family in Pont Street, during the holidays, but the occasion was not a success. They clearly thought that I was having a bad influence on their son. It was, indeed, a romantic attachment, though on my side not overtly physical. On the one occasion on which he put his arms around me and said that he loved me I was embarrassed and disengaged myself. After leaving Eton, he went to Cambridge and fell under the influence of Guy Burgess, a contemporary of ours at school whom I did not get to know until some years later. Whether at Guy's instigation or not, he became an ardent communist. On the last occasion that we met, some time in the late nineteen-thirties, I confronted him with a report of the extravagantly fulsome terms in which the speaker at some Russian congress had referred to Stalin. I expected him to agree that they were ridiculous, but he said that they expressed his own feelings. It was not so obvious then, as it has since become, that Stalin was such an unworthy object of them. By then, David was or. the point of leaving for America, having married an American. He ran the Communist Party in California and died there in the course of the war. I have heard rumours that he did not die from natural causes but do not know whether they have any foundation.

The main method of teaching at Oxford, then as now, was the tutorial system. Throughout the time that I was working for Greats I was given two tutorials a week, one in philosophy and one in ancient history. Like most pupils in those days, I was taken individually, so that I had to write a weekly essay for each of them, on subjects set by the tutors. The essays were read aloud and then discussed for the remainder of the hour. This system was beneficial to the undergraduates, who were forced by it to do a certain amount of reading and also stood to profit from individual attention, but it made heavy demands upon the tutors, not all of whom were equal to them. Some tutors were shy with their pupils; a few were reported even to be inarticulate; some had set pieces which they delivered to each man in turn, no matter what he needed to know or might himself have said; others discouraged their pupils by pouncing too fiercely on what they took to be error: the best of them attended to their pupil's essay, pointed out its mistakes or omissions in a friendly way, argued the controversial issues that it brought up, and guided the pupil forwards, if possible to make his own discoveries. Nearly all of them were conscientious, and the number of their pupils, in addition to the occasional need for preparing lectures and the time unavoidably given to college and university business, left them little leisure for their own research. Fortunately the terms were only eight weeks long and a respectable number of books and articles did somehow get written....

My Christ Church tutors in philosophy were Gilbert Ryle and Michael Foster, in Greek history Robin Dundas and in Roman history Bobbie Longden. Of these men by far the most important to me, then and afterwards, was Gilbert Ryle. He was twenty-nine when I first got to know him, a big man with something of a military manner, though he had not been old enough to take part in the first world war. As an Oxford undergraduate he had rowed in trial eights and an oar hung over the mantelpiece in his rooms. A confirmed bachelor, he was, in Dr Johnson's phrase, a very clubbable man and the communal life of the college suited him well... One of the qualities which most distinguished Ryle as a tutor was the breadth of his philosophical horizon.

Robin Dundas, with whom I began my study of Greek history, was among the most senior of the Students, as Christ Church misleadingly calls its Fellows. He had been in the same election as J. M. Keynes at Eton and an undergraduate at New College I before the first world war, in which he had fought. A well-to-do Scottish gentleman, he had a soft voice, a quiet manner, a polished style and an astringent wit. He had no thought of making any contribution to his subject, but he read all the relevant literature, and taught his pupils conscientiously, relying on a copious set of notes which he kept up to date: it was a great disaster for him towards the end of his career when he left them in a train. I think that I first caught sight of him in Chapel at Eton, which he used to attend in order to look over the boys who might find their way to Christ Church. He was homosexual in sentiment, though I doubt if he ever practised. For some reason, he conceived it to be his duty to instruct undergraduates in the facts of life, about which some of them may have known more than he did. This was a harmless proceeding, which may in rare instances even have been beneficial, but a few years earlier Wystan Auden, who was then a Christ Church undergraduate, had maliciously pretended to be shocked by it and had complained to Keith Feiling, the Conservative historian, who was a Student of Christ Church before his election to a professorship. Feiling had foolishly taken the matter to the Governing Body and Dundas had been so embarrassed that he had taken a year's sabbatical leave to go round the world.

It was through the Jowett Society that I came to know Isaiah, or as his friends then called him, Shaya Berlin. We already had a slight connection in that his father, who came from Riga, was also in the timber trade and knew both my father and my father's partner Mr Bick, but although we had known of each other through the Bicks, we had never met. Isaiah had gone to school at St Paul's and had come up to Oxford a year ahead of me as a classical scholar at Corpus. Andrew and I called on him in the belief that a meeting of the Jowett Society was being held in his rooms, but either we had been misinformed, or the venue of the meeting had been changed, and we found him alone. Having introduced ourselves, we entered into conversation. It can be said of Isaiah as Dr Johnson said of Burke that he is "such a man, that if you met him for the first time in the street where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner that when you parted you would say, this is an extraordinary man." On this occasion, we had hardly begun talking before I said to Andrew, "Let's not go to the meeting. This man is much more interesting." Not caring to be treated as if he had been put on show, Isaiah hustled us away to the meeting, but this was the beginning of a friendship that has lasted for over forty years.

One of the things that first brought us together was our common interest in philosophy. This is an interest that we no longer share, since Isaiah was persuaded by the American logician H. M. Sheffer, in the early nineteen-forties, that the subject had developed to a point where it required a mastery of mathematical logic which was not within his grasp: thereafter he chose to cultivate the lusher field of political theory. His approach to philosophy had indeed always been more eclectic than mine and more critical than constructive. In our frequent discussions, his part was usually to find unanswerable objections to the extravagant theories that I advanced. He once described me to a common friend as having a mind like a diamond, and I think it is true that within its narrower range my intellect is the more incisive. On the other hand, he has always had the readier wit, the more fertile imagination and the greater breadth of learning. The difference in the working of our minds is matched by a difference in temperament, which has sometimes put a strain upon our friendship. I am more resilient, more reckless and more intolerant; he is more mature, more expansive and more responsible. At times he has found me too theatrical and been shocked by my sensual self-indulgence. I have sometimes wished that he were more revolutionary in spirit. I credit us both with a strong moral sense, but it expresses itself in rather different ways.

As this shows, I was never very close to Maurice Bowra, though we were always on good terms with one another. He thought of me as gifted, going so far in his memoirs as to refer to me as a 'young genius', but I had the impression that he approved of me more than he liked me. We got on well enough in company but when we were alone together there was a feeling of unease. Behind his bravura there was a sense of insecurity and there were only a few people with whom he wholly relaxed his guard. He had affairs with women, including at least one whom he wished to marry, but he was also homosexual and the homosexual strain in him was the stronger. It may have been partly for this reason that he sought the company of undergraduates, whether or not they shared this sexual taste. Nowadays the younger Oxford dons do not command the service, even if they had the means, to entertain on the scale that Maurice and some others used to do, but this is not the only factor. The Oxford system of education also suffers from the decline in the number of bachelor dons, who take an interest in the undergraduates which extends beyond the supervision of their work.

It most decidedly represented the attitude of Goronwy Rees, to whom Martin Cooper introduced me. As Martin reported it to me, Goronwy's first reaction was one of surprise that Martin should make friends with anyone so ugly, but either my looks improved or he became reconciled to them, since he has remained the closest to me of any of the Oxford friends of my youth. He himself had the romantic good looks that one associates with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and was full of vitality and charm.

He had been brought up at Aberystwyth, where his father, a distinguished theologian, was much in demand as a preacher, and though he had a great affection and respect for his father, he was in moral and intellectual revolt against his Calvinist principles. He had been to school in Cardiff, where he had been conspicuous as an athlete as well as a scholar and had played in a trial as scrum-half for the Welsh schoolboys. Coming up a year ahead of me with a scholarship at New College, he was one of those who prospered under Joseph, and after getting a first in PPE, he was elected to a Fellowship at All Souls. It was said that the All Souls examiners were particularly impressed by an essay which he wrote about the middle class. He already had literary ambitions and his first novel, a love-story with some philosophical overtones, was written while he was still an undergraduate. His critical standards were high and I remember that when I published my affected and ill-written essay about bull-fighting, he advised me quite sharply to stick to philosophy. In fact, I wrote hardly anything as an undergraduate besides my tutorial essays. Apart from the unfortunate essay on bull-fighting, I recall only a review for Cherwell of an OUDS production of Flecker's Hassan, starring my friend Giles Playfair, in which I was over-indulgent to the play, if not to the players, and an essay on Cynicism which I wrote in my first term for a magazine got up by one of my Christ Church friends. The argument of the essay was that love was destructive of pride. I remember only the last sentence, because it impressed Gilbert Ryle: "The holes in the mantle of Antisthenes have been mended with loving hands."

Soon after the examination for Greats was over, Gilbert Ryle drove me to Cambridge in order to introduce me to Wittgenstein. They were personal friends though they had their differences, one of them arising from Gilbert's refusal to admit that it was inconceivable that there should ever be a good British film. Admittedly, Wittgenstein's taste ran to Westerns and to musicals, at which it was not very likely that Elstree would ever rival Hollywood. I do not think that they often discussed philosophy, in which their style was very different although their thoughts were later to run on rather similar lines. Wittgenstein had already moved away from the position which he held in the Tractatur, but his current views were imparted only to the narrow circle of his Cambridge pupils. He was at pains to keep any report of them out of general circulation, from a morbid fear of their being misrepresented or plagiarized. It was not until the late nineteen-thirties that one or two copies of notes taken from his lectures, the celebrated Blue and Brown Books, somehow managed to find their way to Oxford. So far as I was concerned, the Wittgenstein whom I was meeting in the summer of 1932 was still the Wittgenstein of the Tractatu.

He was then in his early forties but looked younger. He was small, thin and wiry and charged with nervous energy. One could see him as a mountaineer. His face was ascetic and remarkable chiefly for the eyes, which were blue and penetrating. He spoke softly in the manner of one who did not need to raise his voice in order to compel attention. His English was fluent and the Austrian accent not obtrusive. The rooms in which he lived were at the top of a long staircase near the main gate of Trinity. His sitting-room was small and white-washed like a monk's cell. There was hardly any furniture in it, and no apparent provision for receiving guests. However, two deck chairs were brought out of a cupboard and unfolded for us, and a box of biscuits offered to us.

It was also in 1936 that I first began to engage seriously in politics, to which I had paid very little attention since I had ceased to frequent the Oxford Union. My sympathies had indeed come to lie vaguely with the left and I remember arguing with my grandfather at the time of the General Election of 1931, when the Labour party was shattered by the defection of Ramsay MacDonald to lead a National Government.

My grandfather took my defence of socialism as an attack upon himself, asked what would become of his servants if his money was taken from him, and told me the well-known story of the millionaire who calculated that if his wealth were shared out equally everyone would get a farthing and presented his critic with his share. While I could see that these were not very strong arguments, I was too little concerned with the question to make any serious effort to rebut them, and contented myself with some vague remarks about the re-organization of society. I was in Vienna when the Oxford Union passed its famous resolution against fighting for King and Country, which to the extent that it was serious was a fairly natural consequence of all that my generation had been told about the futility and horror of the first world war. I had, however, voted in the Peace Ballot, organized by the League of Nations Union, the result of which fatally persuaded Baldwin that to pursue a policy of re-armament would cost the Conservatives the 1935 election. Like the majority of those who voted, I took the inconsistent position of opposing re-armament and favouring collective security. Roy Harrod in his book The Prof recalls an evening in Christ Church in which he and I argued about this with Lindemann and had the worst of the argument. As a rational man, Roy then started to campaign for re-armament. I am sorry to say that I did not.

What awakened me to politics was not the menace of Hitler or the plight of the unemployed in England, for all that I sympathized with the hunger marchers, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. This was an issue which I saw entirely in black and white. Franco was a military adventurer employing Moorish, Italian and German troops to massacre his own countrymen in the interest of rapacious landlords allied with a bigoted and reactionary church. The Republican Government against which he was in rebellion was the legitimate government of Spain: its supporters were fighting not only for their freedom but for a new and better social order. The I fact that the anarchists, initially much more numerous than the i communists, played such a conspicuous part in the Spanish working class movement increased my sympathy for it. Of course I now know that the facts were not quite so simple. The government had been weak; the anarchists had fomented disorder; there was terrorism on both sides; when the dependence of the Republican cause on the supply of arms from Russia and the help of the International

Brigades brought the communists to power, they exercised it ruthlessly. Nevertheless, it remains true that Franco's rule was tyrannical, that he could not have won without foreign help, that the assistance which he received from the Italians and the Germans in men and material came earlier and remained far greater than that which the Government received from Russia, and that the timid and hypocritical policy of non-intervention pursued by the French and British Governments, denying the Spanish Government their right to purchase arms, told heavily in Franco's favour. The hatred which I then felt for Neville Chamberlain and his acolytes, mainly on account of their appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini but also because of their strictly business-like attitude to domestic problems, has never left me, and I still find it difficult to view the Conservative party in any other light.

You had, indeed, to be very deep in the faith to be able to persuade yourself that the confessions made by the old Bolsheviks at the Moscow trials were genuine, but the appalling extent of the Stalinist terror was not known, and it was easier than it would be now to dissociate the principles of communism from what could still be seen as an outbreak of factional warfare among the Soviet hierarchy.

I too felt the prevalent attraction. By 1937 communism had made enough headway among the undergraduates to make it possible for Philip Toynbee, standing as a communist, to become President of the Oxford Union, and he was very insistent that I should join the party. I flirted with the idea for a time and then allowed myself a weekend to come to a decision. Though I was sorry to disappoint Philip, my decision was negative. I declined to join or. the ground that I did not believe in dialectical materialism.

This seemed frivolous to Philip, whose relatively brief adherence to communism was mainly the outcome of a generous emotion, tinged with a youthful desire to epater la bourgeoisie, and he maintained that my real reason for not joining was that I was unwilling to submit to party discipline, which would be exercised over me by undergraduates and, as he had let slip, would extend even to my private life. This may, indeed, have been a factor in my decision, but the reason which I gave him was not a pretext. It did seem to me that if one was to join the Communist party, one ought at least to believe in its underlying theory.

In truth, I was not so much a socialist as a radical. I was morally shocked by the currently gross disparities in wealth and power and wished to see the balance redressed, but I did not believe that a sufficient or even perhaps a necessary condition of a better social order lay in the nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange. To the extent that it could be dissociated from the evils of laissez-faire capitalism, I had more sympathy for the outlook of John Stuart Mill than for that of Lenin. This rather uneasy position was characteristic of many of my friends and acquaintances in Oxford, including the majority of those who regularly attended what was known as the Pink Lunch, a fortnightly occasion at which a modest meal at a local restaurant was followed by the delivery and discussion of a political address. The leading spirit of the group was G. D. H. Cole, the Professor of Social and Political Theory, a left-wing socialist who was so strong a man of principle that he was said to refuse to dance with any woman who held right-wing views, and the membership included, besides such Labour stalwarts as Patrick Gordon-Walker, Frank Pakenham, Douglas Jay and A. L. Rowse, a fair number of the younger dons , like Guy Chilver, Tony Andrewes and Isaiah Berlin who, with no very active engagement in politics, were morally drawn towards the left. I remember a meeting at which the group was addressed by John Strachey, who was at that time a communist and had written a I successful book for Gollancz on The Coming Struggle for Power. A fluent political theorist, he had been led by the labour debacle of 1931 to join the motley company of Mosley's short-lived New Party, before Mosley deviated into fascism, and reverting from communism was later to become a Labour minister. The argument which he presented to us was that our Fabian approach was bound to be unsuccessful since the members of the ruling class would "see us coming" and would be able to frustrate any measures of reform that seriously threatened their position. To the objection that they would have the same resources and an even stronger motive for frustrating ; an attempt to organize a violent revolution, he did not appear to have any adequate reply.

By this time my life with Renée had begun to go awry. Some months before, at the end of a winter term, I was sharing a taxi on the way to Oxford station with a girl whom I knew only slightly when it suddenly became clear that we wanted one another. I immediately told the driver to turn back, took the girl to my rooms and made love to her. I wished it to be something more than a casual affair, but the girl, who was engaged to be married, viewed it differently. I made desperate attempts to see her in London, but on the one or two occasions when I persuaded her to meet me, it was clear that she wished to be rid of me. After that I engaged in a series of affairs which I concealed from Renée, but could not conceal from her that something was amiss. In the summer of 1937, we left Valerie in a Norland nursery and went alone on holiday together, staying in a hotel at Annecy. I was restless and ill-humoured and for the first time in nearly ten years we were not at ease in one another's company. It was distressing to me but also something of a relief to my conscience when Renée, with her deeper nature, became seriously attracted to a friend of mine, a younger man who was very much in love with her. He told me of it but I treated his confession lightly. In the Christmas holidays the three of us went to Paris together, but finding the strain too great, I soon returned alone. I planned to arrive in time for Christmas but there was fog in the Channel and I remember spending Christmas morning on the quayside at Calais, looking disconsolately out to sea and chatting to Carroll Levis, a jovial impresario who had become well-known as a promoter of theatrical discoveries. After some hours the fog lifted and I arrived back in London in time to have a solitary dinner at a Lyons restaurant. For once I felt a little sorry for myself but I soon plunged into a round of parties and was cheerful enough by the time that Renee returned.

Arthur Koestler had already published Darkness at Noon and Scum of the Earth, and I had read and admired them both. He had no reason to distinguish me from any other Guards Officer and seemed a little taken aback when we fell into an argument. I was the first to leave, and as I made my way downstairs I heard him ask Paul rather sharply who I was. Since then our relations have been chequered. There have been times when we have been good friends, but longer periods of estrangement in which, on my side, at least, our intellectual differences have been emotionally tinged. This extends to my judgement of him as a writer. I think very highly of his autobiographical books and continue greatly to admire the psychological and political insight of Darkness at Noon. At the same time, I cannot help wishing that he would leave philosophy alone.

Among other things, Darkness at Noon was the expression of Koestler's own disillusionment with the Communist party. The attraction which Soviet communism held in the middle nineteen-thirties had waned in England as a result of the Moscow trials and the Russian-German pact, but it was renewed with the entry of Russia into the war and increased with the success of Russian arms. A remarkable communist, with whom I made friends at this time, was Wilfred Macartney, the author of a book called Walls Have Mouths, which had made a strong impression on me. It was an account of his experiences in prison, where he had served a long sentence for a clumsy attempt at espionage. White-haired and rubicund, with the manner of a hard-drinking journalist, he had a vitality which his years in prison appeared to have done nothing to diminish. He was the most conspicuous example that I have ever come across of those who combine left-wing opinions with an appetite for high-living. I think of him in an expensive hotel suite, which he had the air of having annexed, drinking champagne and surrounded by pretty girls, being still unwilling to deny the possibility that the defendants in the Moscow trials had really been guilty of the charges brought against them. He was not a man whom one could altogether admire but one would have needed to be a greater puritan than I was not to enjoy his company.

The New York offices of SOE were in Rockefeller Center. It shared them with other Intelligence agencies under the general title of British Security Co-ordination. When I reported there for work, I was delighted to find that the head of my section was Bill Deakin, whom I had not seen since the beginning of the war. Combining authority with tact, he ran the section most efficiently. My first duty was to learn as much as I could about South American politics and the persons and organizations in the various countries who were likely to be German or Italian sympathizers. At the beginning, therefore, my time was mostly spent in mastering the contents of a very large number of files. The countries about which I came to know most were Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Peru. Much of this knowledge had no very clear relation to the war, but I enjoyed acquiring it and found myself valuing it for its own sake.

My closest colleague was Tony Samuel, with whom I shared an office. The youngest of three brothers, of whom I had known the second slightly at school, he was well provided with money; his grandfather, the first Lord Bearstead, had been one of the founders of the Shell Oil Company. Tony was several years younger than I, but shrewd and worldly wise. He suffered from deafness, which gave him an air and also, I think, a feeling of detachment. Unaffectedly generous, and with a vein of ironic humour, he was an agreeable companion both inside and outside the office. In the fifteen months or more that we worked together, I do not remember that we ever quarrelled.

Among the members of the other sections whom I got to know more or less well, a surprising number had a literary or theatrical background. There was the playwright, Ben Levy, who unlike most of the others was politically conscious and became a Labour member' of Parliament for a brief period after the war; his friend, Eric Maschwitz, a composer of lyrics for musical comedies and revues who had written the song A Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square; Montgomery Hyde, the author among many other books of an excellent biography of Oscar Wilde; Christopher Wren, not, I think, himself a writer but the son of the author of Beau Geste; and my best friend among them, the elegant and charming Tim Brooke, who had worked in Hollywood. A later recruit from Hollywood ; was the novelist Noel Langley, who had gone there to make money but complained about its materialist values: he had written among other things the film script for The Wizard of Oz. His arrival succeeded that of my old Oxford friend Giles Playfair, an actor turned author, and of Bunty Howard, who was married to the actor Jack McNaughton and herself an actress. They had come from Australia, having escaped from Singapore when it fell to the Japanese.

A more important figure in the office than any of these was an international lawyer called Alexander Halpern, a Russian who had held some position in the Kerensky government. His wife Salome had kept the title of Princess and something of what I took to be the style of the ancien regime. They settled in London after the war, and I used often to meet Guy Burgess at their house. They took his discourses on politics more seriously than I did, but I do not believe that they suspected how far his commitment to communism had gone. Another of my colleagues whom I have occasionally seen in later life was Ivar Bryce, who might have served as a model for James Bond, the creation of his friend Ian Fleming, if one could imagine Bond divested of his appetite for violence. Ivar's looks were such that when he walked past our offices, the secretaries, who were massed in the centre, seemed each to give a little sigh. Like my own secretary Margery Cummer, of whom I became very fond, they were nearly all recruited from Canada. One reason for this may have been that the head of the office, William Stephenson, was a Canadian. He is said to have been an impressive person and good at the work, for which he was given a knighthood, but I never rose far enough in the hierarchy to meet him.

Seeing Gilbert Highet again in New York and finding that he had something of a bad conscience about taking no part in the war, I spoke about him to Bill Deakin, who thereupon enlisted him in our section. Gilbert put his considerable energy into the work and did it so well that when Bill left us a few months later to go first to Cairo and then to be parachuted into Jugoslavia, as leader of the first British mission to make contact with Tito, Gilbert was preferred to Tony Samuel and myself as his successor. Being comfortable as we were, neither Tony nor I begrudged him this promotion. It was an embarrassment as well as a source of pride to Gilbert when his wife, Helen MacInnes, published Above Suspicion, the first of her long series of spy stories, since he thought that he might be suspected of having broken his oath of secrecy by giving her advice. In fact, I have no doubt that the novel, which was an immediate success, was written entirely without his help. Its villain was modelled on Adam von Trott, who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol when Gilbert was there, and a great social success in Oxford; he had joined the German Foreign Service and was employed in their Embassy in Washington. It turned out later that Helen had done him an injustice. He was indeed a Nationalist but not a Nazi, and his involvement in the unsuccessful plot against Hitler, in 1944, was to bring him torture and death.

Apart from keeping an eye on South America, the main business of our New York office had been to try to counteract the influence of the various groups in the United States that were either hostile to Britain or at any rate determined that their government should maintain a strict neutrality. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurred about a fortnight after I arrived in the United States, and the American declaration of war on all the Axis powers, our work lost much of its importance. Not only did the American Government assume the chief responsibility for counter-espionage inside its own territory, but, following an old tradition, it regarded the countries of Central and South America as falling within its sphere of influence. At that time its own intelligence services were not very well co-ordinated; it became a joke among us that some South American informants were making a good living out of obtaining doubtful information from one United States agency and selling it to another: nevertheless these agencies saw it as their show and were not disposed to have us meddling in it. This did not mean that we withdrew our agents from the field, but we had to be careful about adding to their number. The result was that, for the time being at least, there was no question of my proceeding to any South American country.

Though I occupied too humble a position in the office to have any say in the policy of SOE, and though I had nothing to do with the dispatching of its agents to France, or their maintenance in the field, I found my work interesting and did it diligently enough to I earn a somewhat belated promotion to the rank of captain in September 1943, almost three years to the day since I had first been commissioned.

Early in 1944 I volunteered for a mission which would have meant my being parachuted into France. I was provisionally accepted, but before I even started my course of training, the project was cancelled, not altogether to my regret. I was not so much afraid of being killed as of being captured and tortured. One was provided with a pill of cyanide, but this in itself presented a problem. It would be cowardly and foolish to take it if there was any likelihood of one's not being gravely suspect, or thought to possess information of any serious importance, but if one was thoroughly searched, and the pill found in one's possession, it would be evidence that one had something to tell. Worries of this sort would probably have made me an unsatisfactory agent, and I dare say that I should have shown myself in training to be unsuitable in other ways. I was, however, sorry not to have been given at least the opportunity to learn to parachute. If I had needed consolation for being deprived of this adventure, it came in March 1944 in the much less dramatic form of a mission to Algiers.

The resistance forces in the area of Toulouse, which had helped to speed the German withdrawal, were led by men of strong personality, including the writer Andre Malraux, who had served in the

Republican Air Force in the Spanish Civil War, and had in other ways shown his political sympathy with the left, though he was later to become one of the most fervent supporters of de Gaulle. Their overall command had been rather surprisingly entrusted to an Englishman, Colonel George Starr, a Buckmaster agent previously known to me by his pseudonym of Hilaire, who had spent over two years in the region, courageously and efficiently building up his resistance organization, and had acquired a devoted local following. He had received the command from the French General Koenig who, while still in North Africa, had been put in titular authority over the French Forces of the Interior. The civilian prefect, appointed by de Gaulle, was Pierre Bertaux, who had been in Toulouse before the war as a Professor of German at the University. He was a capable administrator and for a period shortly after the war enjoyed a stormy career as head of the Paris Surete, with responsibility for the police, before returning to his academic pursuits.

When I arrived in Toulouse at the beginning of September the town was quiet, though Starr regarded himself as responsible to General Koenig and the Allied High Command rather than to Bertaux, and the members of the principal resistance groups showed greater loyalty to their own leaders than to any central authority. They also seemed reluctant to return to the comparatively humdrum routine of an ordered civilian life. Some of them were revolutionary in spirit, but did not appear to be making any plans for concerted political action. I called on Pierre Bertaux, with whom I subsequently became friends, and gained the impression that while he was aware of the factors that might make for local disorder, he did not see them as posing a serious threat to his position.

Another new friend that I made at this time in Paris was George Orwell, who was then a foreign correspondent for the Observer. He had been in College at Eton in the same election as Cyril Connolly, but had left before I came there. I first heard of him in 1937 when he published The Road to Wigan Pier for Gollancz's Left Book Club. By the time that I met him in Paris, I had also read two of his other autobiographical books, Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London, and greatly admired them both. Though I came to know him well enough for him to describe me as a great friend of his in a letter written to one of our former Eton masters in April 1946, he was not very communicative to me about himself. For instance, he never spoke to me about his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, whose death in March 1945 left him in charge of their adopted son, who was still under a year old. I had assumed that it was simply through poverty that he had acquired the material for his book Down and Out in Paris and London by working as a dish-washer in Paris restaurants and living as a tramp in England, before he escaped into private tutoring, but I came to understand that it was also an act of expiation for his having served the cause of British colonialism by spending five years in Burma as an officer of the Imperial Police. Not that he was wholly without respect for the tradition of the British Empire. In the revealing and perceptive essay on Rudyard Kipling, which is reproduced in his book of Critical Essays, he criticizes Kipling for his failure to see "that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited," but he goes on to make the point that "the nineteenth century Anglo-Indians ... were at any rate people who did things," and from his talk as well as his writings I gained the impression that for all their philistinism he preferred the administrators and soldiers whom Kipling idealized to the ineffectual hypocrites of what he sometimes called "the pansy left".

Though he held no religious belief, there was something of a religious element in George's socialism. It owed nothing to Marxist theory and much to the tradition of English Nonconformity. He saw it primarily as an instrument of justice. What he hated in contemporary politics, almost as much as the abuse of power, was the dishonesty and cynicism which allowed its evils to be veiled. When I first got to know him, he had written but not yet published Animal Farm, and while he believed that the book was good he did not foresee its great success. He was to be rather dismayed by the pleasure that it gave to the enemies of any form of socialism, but with the defeat of fascism in Germany and Italy he saw the Russian model of dictatorship as the most serious threat to the realization of his hopes for a better world. He was not yet so pessimistic as he had become by the time of his writing 1984. His moral integrity made him hard upon himself and sometimes harsh in his judgement of other people, but he was no enemy to pleasure. He appreciated good food and drink, enjoyed gossip, and when not oppressed by ill-health was very good company. He was another of those whose liking for me made me think better of myself.

Language, Truth and Logic made my name as a philosopher and I am gratified by its continued success. What sometimes annoys me is to find it still rated above all my later work. I should prefer to think that I had made some progress in the course of the past forty years. This is not, however, for me alone to judge and, at the worst, I still count it better fortune to have gained a reputation by a youthful performance than never to have gained one at all.

It may have been through my friendship with George Orwell that I came to join the Editorial Board of a new magazine called Polemic, of which the first number appeared in October 1945. The magazine was financed by a rich young Australian called Rodney Phillips and edited by Humphrey Slater, with whom I also very soon made friends. A few years older than I, Humphrey, who was then known as Hugh Slater, had been an art student at the Slade in the early nineteen-thirties and a member of the Communist party. Having gone to Spain as a political journalist, he joined the International Brigade in 1936 and showed such military skill that he became its Chief of Operations. By the time that he left Spain in 1938, his experiences there had turned him against the communists, so that his political position was similar to that of George Orwell. He had, however, developed a greater interest in philosophy than in politics and sought to make Polemic as much a philosophical as a political or literary magazine. Thus, in his first editorial, he listed the four aspects of contemporary life with which we are especially concerned as "(i) The discovery of the unconscious, (ii) The evolution of the problem of verbal meaning, (iii) The success of Marxism, (iv) The fundamental significance of the arts." The contributors to the first number, which was sold out within two days of publication, were Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, the psychologist Edward Glover, the American writer Henry Miller, C. E. M. Joad, Rupert Crawshay-Williams and myself. Russell supplied a critical but mainly friendly account of Logical Positivism, George Orwell a longer essay called Notes on Nationalism, taking "nationalism" in a broad sense in which it covered uncritical devotion to any sort of creed, Joad attacked the view, which he attributed to scientists like Julian Huxley and C. H. Waddington, that ethics depends on the direction of evolution, and I contributed an essay on Deistic Fallacies, in which I tried to bring out some of the logical difficulties which confront the belief that the world is a divine creation. I ended by drawing the conclusion that our lives can have no other meaning or purpose than those that we choose to give them.

Though I did not see so much of Russell at this time as I did a few years later, we were already on the way to becoming friends. He talked to me more freely than he had when I first met him, and I became even more impressed by his vitality, the breadth of his learning, and his extraordinary feats of memory. The basis of our friendship was also partly philosophical. Though there were many crucial points on which I disagreed with him, my approach to the subject and my general standpoint were similar to his own; and his recognition of this, and of the respect in which I held him, was important to him at a time when he felt that his work was being undervalued by most of the younger English philosophers, as compared with that of Wittgenstein and Moore. His resentment of this injustice gave a personal edge to his disapproval of current fashion; in allowing his hostility to the idiom of linguistic philosophy to extend to nearly all its content, he was sometimes unjust in his turn. Even so, I think that his view of the philosophical limitations of the study of ordinary usage, as it came to be practised, was substantially right.

We also sometimes talked about politics, in which he retained a strong interest, though he was not yet so absorbed in it as he became in the last decade of his life. He had long held the view that the only remedy for the evils of nationalism lay in the establishment of a world government and he then believed that the only practical way in which this could come about was through the hegemony of the United States. Though there was much that he disliked in its political and social climate, he still preferred it to that of Soviet Russia; but this counted with him for less than the fact that the Americans possessed the atomic bomb, while the Russians did not. He was convinced that it would be enough for the Americans to threaten the Russians with the bomb, without actually using it. This did not, however, absolve him from holding the view that in the last resort its use would be justified. In later years, when he was leading the campaign for nuclear disarmament, he forgot that he had ever taken this view and admitted that he had done so only when it was shown that he had expressed it in print. His critics naturally accused him of inconsistency, but they could have been wrong. Taking, as he did, a predominantly utilitarian view of politics, he could have argued that so long as only one power possessed this superior weapon, the evil resulting from its limited employment, though very great, would be outweighed by the probable longer-term good; when two rival powers possessed it, the harm done by their each employing it would almost certainly be greater than any good that could be expected to result. But while Russell might have accepted this argument theoretically, I doubt if he would have been ready to see it put into effect. His reason was often in conflict with his emotions, and this is most probably an instance in which his emotions would have prevailed. If it had come to an issue, I think that he would have recoiled from the infliction of so great an immediate evil, even with the prospect of its leading to a greater good. It was because I believed this at the time that I did not on this point take him wholly seriously.

Russell had a very low opinion of Cyril Joad, whose name he sometimes deliberately mispronounced. Apart from disliking his manner and appearance, he also accused him of plagiarism. There is a story that when asked to review one of Joad's books, he wrote in refusal: "Modesty forbids". Joad had become famous as a broadcaster, appearing regularly with Julian Huxley and Commander Campbell, a breezy ex-naval officer, on a programme called The Brains Trust: it was originally a wireless programme, though later transferred to television. Joad did this very well, though he may have slightly misled the public by giving the impression that philosophers typically begin their answers to every question by saying, "It depends on what you mean by." He taught philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, where they refused to make him a professor, though he allowed himself to be called so on The Brains Trust. His talent for popularization came out also in his writing, and the introductory books on philosophy which he wrote before the war performed a useful service, perhaps all the more for what they owed to Russell. He held progressive views on most topics, including the view that one should not take too many baths, on the ground that they robbed the body of its natural oils. I rather liked him for his animal spirits, though I did not respect him. I remember meeting him by accident towards the end of the war and being told, when I asked him what he was working on, that he was writing a book in favour of religion. When I showed some surprise, he said quite seriously that I did not seem to understand that after the war religion would be coming back into fashion. Many years later he underwent what was, to all appearances, a genuine religious conversion.

Since the breakdown of my marriage I had made no attempt to resist the attraction which women had for me. In the Easter vacation of 1946 I returned to Paris to see my friends there and conceived a sudden and violent passion for an English girl whom I had met once before in Oxford and had not especially planned to see again. She was married, already had a child, and was carrying another, but she nevertheless agreed to leave her husband and join me in the summer. I found a place for her to live in London, until she could get a divorce. I had previously started an affair in Oxford with a friend of hers, a younger girl with whom I did not wholly succeed in breaking, though I told her what had happened. This friend went to stay with her in Paris, a few days before she was due to join me in London. When they had compared notes, she sent me a telegram to say that she was not coming. I did not reply to the telegram, or ask for any explanation. My feelings were a mixture of regret and relief. I did not pretend to myself that I had come at all well out of it, but I already knew that I was not yet emotionally equipped for the responsibility that I had undertaken.