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By Root 1729 0

But the teacher–author speaks directly to the potential readers. Lecturing was probably still the major form of teaching in my academic generation, and in many ways lecturers relate to any room full of students as actors relate to the faces before them in the theatre except that their house lights don’t go out. We are both performers, they are what we perform for. There is nothing like lecturing to tell us when we are losing the attention of the audience. Nevertheless, the lecturer’s task is harder, for he or she expects the audience to carry away a load of specific information and ideas which they should remember and digest, and not only the emotional satisfaction of the occasion. Even a good lecturer communicates only what radiates from any other performer with stage presence, namely the projection of a personality, a temperament, an image, a mind at work – and, with a bit of luck, he or she may strike a corresponding spark in the imagination of some people out there. It is through class discussion that we establish whether we have actually communicated what we wanted to. That is one reason why, during my whole career as a university teacher, I preferred general to specialist courses. Indeed, my books on general historical subjects either grew out of student lectures or, after more specialized origins, were tested in student lectures.

The satisfaction of a teacher’s job comes essentially from relations with individuals, but these form only a small part of the very large body of men and women with notebooks in lecture theatres, the vast pile of examination scripts or term papers that fill a university teacher’s working life in the course of his or her career. And even they are part of a pretty unchanging routine. Experienced from inside, a research seminar may be unforgettable, but seen from the outside it merely looks like – and I am thinking of my own at the Institute of Historical Research in London in the 1970s and 1980 – a couple of dozen people in the late afternoon, surrounded by books, sitting along a table discussing a paper read by one of them or an outside visitor, and then going a couple of hundred yards to a pub for a drink or two. Considered as a potential movie, it is not even art-house material.

In memory the academic autobiographer’s years stretch back like the wagons on those endless freight-trains, observed from some hill as they carry containers across the American landscape. Seen in retrospect, the succession of trucks is less interesting than the changing territory through which they pass. In my case they have passed through cities and campuses in three continents – four, if the Americas count as two – though before retirement mostly on relatively brief visits, except for a semester as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967) and a half-year’s teaching and research in Latin America (1971), both with my family. However, a peripatetic life with small children is not ideal for academics, and eventually their schooling made it impossible. I never tested the anti-communism of the US authorities by accepting a permanent appointment in their country. If I was tempted by visiting spells at one or another of the great North American universities, Marlene’s veto stood in the way: small-town academic life was not for her. Only one such place broke her resistance, the Getty Center – then still at Santa Monica – the nearest thing to paradise for scholars, where we spent some time in 1989. However, Los Angeles can hardly be regarded as the sticks. I too had been immunized against the campus life by my own brief experience in the summer quarter at Stanford, then as now a superb university, one of the half-dozen finest in the world, but embedded in Palo Alto, sensationally boring as a community for living in. For many years afterwards I could not even bring myself to revisit this nowhere space of empty streets in which cars visited each others’ owners in beautiful homes.

The ideal arrangement for both of us was a stable metropolitan base varied by the increasingly available academic