I

‘Tell me, Miss Denholm-Young, are you flighty?’

This was 13 December 1971, in the large first-floor room at the front of 47 Banbury Road, the administrative half of the pair of houses in which Wolfson College was temporarily camping while its permanent buildings were going up at the bottom of Linton Road. Book-lined, over-furnished with chintz-covered armchairs and standard lamps, and over-heated by a sealed-in, tropical warmth, the place was quiet, its traditional comfort suggesting an exclusive club in Mayfair or Manhattan. Cigar smoke hung in the air, mixed with a suggestion of apple lofts. The President, leaning back in his chair behind a large desk, was asking questions. It was an interview.

Aged twenty-four, I had applied, from London, for the job of his secretary in College (he had another, private, one at his house). I had a degree in English from UCL, had done a graduate PA course, and was thinking of leaving my dizzy first job at Morgan Grenfell because I was concerned that I couldn’t understand merchant banking and wanted something that I could actually be interested in. I knew little about Berlin (though I was much taken by the fact that he knew David Cecil and had known Elizabeth Bowen, two of my favourite writers), and not much more about Oxford, but hoped I could learn, and had a brother at Queen's and a cousin at St Benet's Hall. Downstairs, I had already had a session with the College Secretary, who had briskly outlined a busy diary, a voluminous correspondence, and rapid audiotape dictation.

The man behind the desk was sixty-two, acute of gaze, through large brown eyes, serious of expression, and, in spite of the Savile Row suit and Oxford accent, foreign. The sort of classic Englishness that I had been used to (and I am very English), illustrated in the men I had grown up among, was evinced by a certain debonairness, a lightness of touch. This man was made of darker, more complex material – an exotic from a different clime. And he did the talking. He described his College and said that he travelled a lot and was writing a book on Vico and Herder for the Hogarth Press and editing the text of his 1970 Romanes Lecture, Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament, for OUP.