ABSTRACT
The world we live in, as Wallace Stevens never tired of saying, is the world of people's imagination. The world of the happy man is different from world of the unhappy man, as Wittgenstein put it. But world people imagine also shapes the world they leave to their children. Oxford was everything the author could have wished for. The author had inspiring teachers and made important friendships, notably with the composer Gordon Crosse, the music scholar at my college, and philosopher John Mepham, who was reading biochemistry at Magdalen. Optimism was the order of the day, as one ex-colony after another shook off the yoke of colonial oppression and the rich Western powers looked back on the Nazi years and swore, 'Never again'. But it seems as if people were too optimistic. As the horrors of the war receded it has become clear that greed and fear are always present and can be activated by the unscrupulous at any time.
