The emeritus professor took brunch on England’s Lane, a habit acquired since his formal retirement. He made for the table by the French doors at the rear, where the view, being of the back of a pleasantly bricked building, was not spectacular, but where the light was natural. Spreading his notes on the empty place opposite, he unfolded his newspaper: a great wheel, he was amused to read, was making steady progress toward the upright. He put the broadsheet aside when the eggs Florentine were served and ate them ravenously while scanning the opening of his lecture. He could rely on a capacity crowd for this evening’s landmark event. The bus from the end of the road took him straight to Bloomsbury.

Though the freshers were first in, they were soon joined by a smattering of the more seasoned, and by keen postgrads too, and finally by the professor’s colleagues, content to stand in the aisle. When he breezed in, notes and texts in a disorganised bundle under his arm, it was, for new undergraduates, their first sight of him in the flesh, this grizzled, lopsided historian, in a much-travelled suit and thick black spectacles, whose accent carried echoes of a distant time. They had seen him on television, of course, often invited as a counterweight to liberal economists; on late-night panels, he was demonstrably expert in books and jazz. An overhead projector stood on the right of the dais, useful in recent years for the summary of detail, and for the odd map, but the professor did not require it for the broad sweep of the matter at stake today.

He ran his eyes over the audience. A new headteacher, proud to be in the vanguard of a government devotion to education so staunch they had named it three times over, had invited him to present the prizes at her school in the Borough of Camden, close to where he lived. He had found himself, to his delight, engaged by her energy and had lingered a while in her office, encouraged by the retrieval from the cabinet of a fifteen-year-old single malt. She had prompted a certain thought about the lecture, he had invited her along, and he was eager to see if she had come.

It had taken some writing, this one, and it had taken some thinking. His wont, when it came to the course’s inaugural address, which had been entrusted to him for the past dozen years, was to synopsize the twentieth Century with a slant that varied from year to year. He might surprise even his colleagues by devoting the entire hour to a component of economic history – grain production, for example, or industrialisation – and tag the politics onto it. He might surprise them less by focussing on film or music and the impact upon culture of the forms of government that had characterised the period. You could go a long way with that. He would always surprise those fresh from ‘A’ level who rarely imagined that an introduction to the course would toy with their intellects in the way that the professor often did...