The British Way

Extract

ONE HAS TO BE CAREFUL ON THESE OCCASIONS. THERE IS SO much accident about it. Personally, as a latedeveloper at school, I did not have matriculation Latin but if I had I would have read History at Oxford. Instead I began in Economics at London University, at University College, by the way, not LSE – I had not heard of either, but LSE looked like the office blocks of Croydon in which my father worked in insurance and UCL looked like a university, as I had seen them in the cinema. But I moved out of Economics when my tutor at the beginning of the third year gave me a very high mark on an essay on ‘Value Theory’, but said: ‘Get out. I advise you to get out. You plainly don't believe in the subject. You will be a brilliant critic of it if you go on. But you don't believe that economic theory is an thing else but an analytical card-castle. If you go on, youdend up by hating your subject, hating yourself, and feeling like I do that you've wasted your life.’ I said that as I was taking Finals that summer, it was a little late to switch. ‘Nonsense’, Alfred Stonier replied, ‘not if you really want to get out of Economics. You are going dong to LSE for Laski's lectures for subsidiary. Government's easy, just reading books. Switch to that till you're clear what to do.’