ABSTRACT
In September 1996, I went “up to Oxford,” to use the British expression, to be the George Eastman Visiting Professor and a Supernumerary Fellow of Balliol College for the academic year 1996-7. It was a completely new cultural experience. It was also a period that ushered in the beginning of an end; because when I “came down” from Oxford in July 1997, I had decided that at the close of the forthcoming academic year I would retire from my faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania and become an emerita professor.
