The America of my infancy was, perhaps to a great degree than would now apply, the America of classic juvenile fiction – the West of R. M. Ballantyne and Fenimore Cooper, the South of Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom's Cabin and, a little later, the Gothic of Edgar Allen Poe and the Mississippi Valley of Mark Twain — a country that had about as close a relationship to one's direct experience as the Spanish Main or the African jungle or the Scotland of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The real America of Coolidge and Hoover offered little to attract and hold attention – apart from gangsters and G-Men (about which I recall writing and acting in a school play Dull Days in Chicago). As appetites grew a little more discriminating the realism of Sinclair Lewis and the satire of John P. Marquand took over from the Hollywood America of thrills and comedy. Even so, America was, in every sense, a far-away country, full of portent and significance of course, but not exciting and relevant, still less attractive.

The coming of Roosevelt and the New Deal should have changed all that, of course. Honesty obliges me to admit that for a third year undergraduate at Oxford, absorbed in Greats, the American re-birth was infinitely less real and challenging than the Nazi eruption in Europe. There is a memory of a dapper, bouncy little figure lecturing to avid audiences in the North School in 1934. But to me Felix Frankfurter, then the visiting George Eastman Professor, was just another American whose lectures on the New Deal and the Constitution held one up en route to Henry Price's expositions of the Theory of Knowledge.