Trials and Tribulations

For me there were two points of departure, the general and the specific. The general was that, while my routine studies at Eton had been quite undistinguished, I had done rather well in the voluntary extra-curricular activities on set books covering historical, literary or political affairs. One holiday task was an assessment of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1888) and one political one (in 1938) was to address the question Can Europe Keep the Peace?, both of which I won. The solitary task of having a single subject to study, analyse and then write about was, I see now, the forerunner of the sort of books that were to occupy so much of my time in the years ahead.