• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1676 0

dominated by Party members, since only the rare, usually indigenous, radical historian with a safe academic base, such as A. H. M. Jones, the ancient historian from Cambridge, had the courage to sit at the same table as the bolsheviks. The eminent art historian Rudolf Wittkower was actually warned not to accept our invitation and it was another ten years before Moses Finley, the victim of US McCarthyism welcomed in Cambridge, was prepared to write for us. We were equally keen to extend the range of our contributors. For several years we failed in the first task, although, thanks to our excellent reputation among younger academics, we soon did better on the second. In 1958 we succeeded. A group of non-Marxist historians of subsequent eminence, led by Lawrence Stone, shortly about to go to Princeton, and the present Sir John Elliott, later Regius Professor at Oxford, who had sympathized with our objectives but until then had found it impossible formally to join the former red establishment, offered to join us collectively on condition that we dropped the ideologically suspect phrase ‘a journal of scientific history’ from our mast-head. It was a cheap price to pay. They did not ask us about our political opinions – actually orthodox communists were no longer easy to find on the board – we did not enquire into theirs, and no ideological problems have ever arisen on its board since then. Even the Institute of Historical Research, which had steadfastly refused to include the journal in its library, relented.

So both my personal life became in some sense ‘normal’ and (in spite of the rhetoric to the contrary) the world I lived in was – or at least looked like – a less insecure and provisional place, and was certainly a more prosperous one. The first observation was undeniable, even though my academic career was still taking its time to develop. I was not to get my chair, or the usual marks of official recognition – academies, the first honorary degrees – until the 1970s, when I was well into my fifties. In retrospect I can see this was a stroke of luck, for nothing is worse for a career than to reach the peak too soon and face the long march along the flat plateau of the establishment or, even worse, the lengthening distance between present achievement and the work that once made one’s reputation. Just because I had started late, and been held up for so many years, I continued to have better things to look forward to at an age when others could expect only to postpone decline.

As for the world, we knew quite well that its stability was only apparent, even though its extraordinary economic and technological leap forward was plain. Nevertheless, for those of us lucky enough to live in central and western Europe, it was not an illusion. We may not have fully recognized our good fortune yet, but we lived in the lands of the blessed: a region without war, without the prospect or fear of social upheaval, in which most people enjoyed a life of wealth, a range of choices in life and leisure, and a degree of social security beyond the reach of all but the very rich in our parents’ generation, and beyond even the dreams of the poor. Ours was a better place to live in than any other part of the world.

I was soon to discover that this could not be said of other parts of the globe. Nor, as the 1960s were soon to show, did it satisfy the inhabitants of the lands of the blessed.

14

Under Cnicht

In 1961, shortly after sitting down with Bertrand Russell and perhaps 12,000 others, on a famous anti-nuclear occasion in Trafalgar Square, fortunately unarrested by the police, I was told by my friend and brother-Apostle Robin Gandy that I looked a bit stressed, and that he thought a few days with him in North Wales would do me good. He had a small, almost aggressively primitive cottage there, next to a dying chapel, where, between hill walks and rock scrambles, he pondered the problems of mathematical logic. In those days, before the wonderful network of small rural railway lines in Britain had been destroyed, it was still possible to