ABSTRACT
Kit Carson came up to Queen’s College, University of Oxford, in 1959, was awarded a BA in Modern History in 1962, proceeded to gain a Diploma in Criminology from the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1964 and returned as a research student to Queen’s College under the supervision of Nigel Walker1 between 1964 and 1966. There were three such graduate students in the University of Oxford at the time, Kit Carson, Dogan Akman2 and myself, and the intellectual setting in which we studied criminology was more than a little threadbare. Kit Carson himself would refer back to the ‘extraordinary isolation in which graduate students existed in Oxford at the time’.3
‘Criminology was a peripheral, under-valued and under-populated enterprise.’4
Indeed, when I was summoned to All Souls College in 1965 to be interviewed
