My LSE was a year or more as an inter-collegiate undergraduate student, then two years as a post-graduate student (1950-2), and then from January 1957 to June 1965 as a member of the staff. But I am only going to write about what I can now remember about what it seemed to me to be like then as a student.

So this has no pretensions to be either history or premature autobiography. True, I’ve dipped into some old files labelled ‘Student Junk’ to get some colour, but they are almost as incomplete and as idiosyncratic as memory; and from my work on Orwell's biography I’ve discovered that human memory even over twenty years is unreliable, patchy, rationalizing and imaginative unless checked point by point with the written record.

The great tradition of LSE as the Sacred College of Social Democracy, the advance guard—if not the whole army—of the social sciences in Great Britain, and of ‘the empire on which the concrete never set’ (whose joke was that really?), all that I saw later but not then. How accidental it is that any individual goes to any particular place and, I scorn teleology, to feel part of an academic tradition is always hindsight. True, I was never more pleased than when The Guardian made me part of that tradition. The back cover of the Pelican edition of my In Defence of Politics has their reviewer saying:

Youthful ambition fulfilled? No, in fact, socialist though I was as a sixth former, I neither knew of LSE in these terms nor wished ‘above all else to go there’. It was accident. I was simply a late developer, nothing but a formidable rugby player, until I prematurely ceased to grown and did unexpectedly well at the old Matric in the Fifth Form and even better in Higher Schools, except that I stubbornly refused to pass Latin even at the lower level.

What, at such a school at Whitgift, could be done with me? A socialist sixth-form master spotted that the Economics Faculty at London required no Latin.