MY DOMINANT INTELLECTUAL CONCERNS HAVE BEEN WORLD politics and history, with strong but subsidiary passions – engaging the mind not less than the body – for watching wild creatures, looking at paintings and buildings and walking and (in my younger days) climbing on mountains. These are not gregarious pursuits; and though I have been a fiercely, and perhaps parochially, loyal member of various small groups at various times I have mostly been a lone magpie, picking up small things from many places.

I used to think the word ‘scholar’ pompous and pretentious, but now I would accept it as a description, using it in the sense prevalent in the Middle Ages, when scholars travelled, in space and time, in pursuit of learning. A learner at least I have been and am. I once believed that I was learning in order to prepare myself for some special service to society: I long ago discovered that I could best serve, inadequately of course but still serve, by going on trying to learn. I have much of which to be ashamed in my life, but of this discovery I am not ashamed.