ABSTRACT
PEACOCK: Well, he had lost his Lecturer, a chap called Blair, who obviously was a very clever man indeed; he was killed in the war. Blair had read very widely, and I later had the chance to look at some of his personal books. He had made his own annotation of editions of Wicksell and others that showed he was very good. Nisbet was left with two Assistants: one was a lady called Isobel Menzies, who was really a psychologist and who later worked at the
Tavistock Institute. The other Assistant finished up in the Board of Trade. They were as green as they came and knew it, but Nisbet did the bulk of the lectures and these were dictated. I was totally confused about the nature of Political Economy at that stage. The History of Thought seemed to have some kind of continuity, and Nisbet clearly knew something about it; but the rest of it-National Income, Production, and so on-that seemed to be very confusing. History of Thought, on the other hand, was the spinal column of the subject.
