We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe. . ,'Cardinal Newman THAT THIS ESSAY SHOULD HAVE TURNED OUT TO BE AS MUCH a matter of introspection as of retrospection should not, after all, have surprised me. As Pascal said, 'la dernibre chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouwage est de savoir qu'il faut mettre la premibre'. If the study of politics has changed over the last half century, why then, so have I. 'You cannot step into the same river twice'. This is my apolo 'a for starting off, not with my subject matter. but with myself! I first expressed my unswervin ambition to be a university set I regarded, n o doubt wrongly, with utter revulsion) from the age of seven when (they tell me) I replied t o some affectionate relative's question that 'I want to be like my brother'. That, of course was Herman who at that dateit would have been 1922 -was just starting his career at the LSE, and exercising as will become clear, a magisterial and wholly begnign intellectual sway over me right up to the war, when we partedhe for Canada and ultimately the USA and I for the army and then the Middle East. In a review of my Comparative Government, Sam Beer commented that its values had clearly been inspired by A. D. Lindsay. Nonsense! I had almost nothing t o do with Sandy Lindsay as an undergraduate. I remember him as an abominable lecturer, reading his notes out to us at dictation speed, and I don't think I attended beyond the first two. But I did come to know him very well after the war when I was a don at Bdiol, where he was Master, and better still when he took me to the newly founded University of Keele, in 1950, as its first Professor teacher (emphatically not a schoo P teacher which from the out-
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