David Simpson

Interview of David Simpson on 13th March 2024, filmed by Alan Macfarlane and edited by Sarah Harrison

[AM – Alan Macfarlane; DS – David Simpson]

AM

So it's a great pleasure to have a chance at last to talk to David Simpson. David, I start by asking when and where you were born.

DS

September 1951 in West Norfolk, a town called Swaffham. Neither of my parents were locals. My father had lived all over but was culturally and primarily a Geordie. My mother was Belgian by birth and they just happened up in this small market town in West Norfolk, Swaffham.

AM

I knew it well. So let's go back. Some people go back to the Norman Conquest, but you don't need to. People often knew their grandparents or were influenced by them. Could you tell me something about your ancestry?

DS

Certainly, as far back as grandparents. My mother's parents continued to live in Belgium. We would see them once a year on a fortnight's holiday. My father's parents lived in the same town. I saw a lot of them. They were the designated babysitters. I actually had very good relations with them. They hated each other, but I got along with both of them.

AM

So your father's parents were Dutch?

DS

No, my mother's parents were Flemish. My father's parents were similarly Geordies. They were primarily Newcastle people.

AM

What did both these branches do?

DS

That's a difficult question. The Belgian branch not very much, except provide a little bit of cosmopolitanism once a year.

AM

As a daytime job.

DS

I'm sorry. They'd all retired by the time I knew them. They all had the art of not doing very much work. Even in their 50s, I think my grandparents, the males were the only ones who worked, weren't doing anything. My mother's father had run a hotel, but he bought it just before the war. The timing was disastrous. It was wrecked during the German occupation and after World War II, when he started it up again, it never really got going. Everything had shifted and the tourist business had changed. It was not the same. My father's father is a kind of Balzacian figure. He was technically the director of a company, but that's far too grand for what he did and what he was. He'd perfected the art of not working. He worked for and eventually invested in and partnered in a company that did road work of various kinds, principally at that time, laying telephone cables.

AM

Up in Newcastle?

DS

They were all over. By the time I knew it, the firm had dwindled to something much smaller. They were largely operating trenching machinery and grass-cutting machinery, and my father was a mechanic and his job was to look after it.

AM

Tell me more about your father.

DS

Difficult, again, that's the long and the short version.

AM

Give me the middle.

DS

O.K. He worked from 14, left school at 14, had no further ed. beyond that age. He had been an itinerant construction worker, as we call them in the States. Navvy, I think we call it here, but it's something in between. He went with his father, who at that point worked, I think, for Wimpey's, a big construction company all over England, and had actually some fascinating stories. He was in the Orkneys when the Royal Oak was sunk. He was in London during the Blitz, as was my mother, as a refugee. He told me once that he'd been on the Isle of Man and they had sent some of the German internees from a camp there to work with his people digging trenches. He said how much he enjoyed meeting them and I often wondered if he might have met some of the famous ones. I think Wittgenstein was there for a while.

AM

Really?

DS

I think so, I may have that wrong. I'll have to check the biography.

AM

Was Wittgenstein a prisoner of war?

DS

Well, the German nationals were interned.

AM

Oh, he was interned.

DS

Well, I think he was. He was either that or hiding up in Norway, but I think he was interned. Certainly some very distinguished German emigres, who were not Nazis, were interned. I just wondered who these people were. He didn't know enough to ask questions, of course, but it's a fascinating coincidence.

AM

And his character and how it shaped you?

DS

Well, Dad and I fought like cats and dogs until I was about 18, 17. We had an enormous fight, [and he changed radically afterwards.] I got on very well with both of them. They were somewhat competitive over their children, so I was my mother's favourite and my brother was my father's favourite. And they fought through their children. They didn't fight with each other, they fought through their children.

AM

Were you the younger one?

DS

I was the older one. My mother always thought that the brains came from her side of the family, which is cock and bull. But it took me a while to realise that, because Dad wasn't terribly articulate and was in some ways kind of taciturn, a working-class personality, and didn't talk easily about his feelings. But we had this enormous fight and I remember staying up late and going at him. And after that, everything was fine. He just utterly changed his paternal personality and it was a wonderful thing. It must have taken some courage.

AM

But before that, what did you fight about?

DS

Oh everything.

AM

From what age?

DS

Probably puberty. Could I wear Beatles boots? Could I grow my hair? That sort of stuff. Off I would be marched for short back and sides. He was, I suspect, like a lot of people, a little unsure and scared about what was happening to culture, particularly youth culture. His own father was not a loving man. His mother was, but his father was not. Neither of my parents had a huge amount of love from their parents. And it's something of a miracle that they did such a good job as they did with us.

AM

Then your mother?

DS

My mother was, as I said, born in Belgium, raised speaking French at school in a convent, Flemish at home. Was evacuated with her two sisters and her mother in May 1940. And they had many gripping tales of that expedition. It took them 11 days to cross the channel in a fishing boat, which ran out of fuel and fended off mines and so on and so forth. And after leaving Dieppe, because they'd gone down the coast to find some fuel, which they didn't find, they ended up losing their way at sea and it landed in Brixham, Devon. So it's far from a direct channel crossing and it took them several days and they had nothing to eat. It's a wonderful story. And they had come because my father had a friend who lived in Barnsley and he had written when the war broke out and said, if your family needs to come to England, I will look after them. They never got to Barnsley because either the British or the Belgians or both had stopped anybody moving around. So they were stuck in London just off Hyde Park when the blitz started. At that point during the bombing, the second evacuation of children occurred. And so my mother and her family, my grandfather was still in Belgium, were evacuated to a mining village in South Wales. It was an extraordinary fate, in the Rhondda Valley, and spent the war there, learning, can you believe, compulsory Welsh in the schools.

AM

I can. So how did she meet your father?

DS

He was stationed in her village after the end of the war. They weren't all sent home straight away. I think he was being prepared for the Japanese campaign, which never happened. And they met through some Red Cross event. My grandfather was in the Red Cross and put on tea and cards for soldiers.

AM

And her character and how it affected you?

DS
Well, how did it affect me? She was very supportive. She was alone with me a lot because Dad travelled in the early years of their marriage. He would come home on a Friday and leave on a Sunday night to whatever job he was working on. So I was alone with her a lot and I think she bonded with her first child, as mothers do. And how did her character affect me? Well, she was a mixture of... how did it affect me? That's a tough one. She had aspirations. She really thought... she felt thwarted. She'd had a chance to go to grammar school in Wales. Okay, here's the answer. And she wasn't allowed to. She was supposed to go back to Belgium. When she went back to Belgium, she became a kind of workhorse in the hotel and didn't have any further ed. and felt very bitter about that because she definitely had interests and ambitions for herself. And I think when I came along, clever little boy, some of that was transferred. And so that was a largely supportive effect because I felt validated and encouraged. But also at times slightly stressful. I had to fight a little bit with her desire to boast about my achievements to others.

AM

You sound like Alan Turing... Same thing with his mother.

DS

Really? Yes. But that makes it sound more negative. I mean, we always got on and although we disagreed about all sorts of things, both of my parents, I think, were sort of lower middle class, working class Tories. But we didn't talk much about that.

AM

Right. So what was your first concrete memory?

DS

Goodness. This I was not prepared for. Concrete memory?

AM

By concrete, I mean most people can remember lying in their pram and some sort of trees overhead. But a specific event.

DS

A specific event... I think I can't, to be honest.

AM

That's interesting.

DS

I would have to waste a lot of time trying to come up with that.

AM

As a Wordsworth expert it's interesting.

DS

I know.

AM

Right. Well, let's go on to your first school. Where did you go to school?

DS

I went to a local grammar school, Hamonds. A small country grammar school. 200 odd boys.

AM

Where is this?

DS

In Swaffham.

AM

So you passed the 11+.

DS

Yes

AM

Let's go back to your primary school. Was that in Swaffham too?

DS

Yes.

AM

Around that time, in other words, up to the age of 11, between say 6 and 11, did you have any particular enthusiasms or hobbies?

DS

Hobbies, enthusiasms. Well, I did the things that boys do. You know, I collected stamps. I read a lot. I had good social relations with my schoolmates. I was neither bullied nor a bully, I hope, most of the time. It was a happy time. The teaching wasn't inspired. I did have one awkward experience, which was being kind of used by one particularly insensitive schoolmaster as a stick to beat the other children with. He can do it, why can't you? sort of thing. I found that intensely uncomfortable.

AM

At what age was this?

DS

Ten. Nine, ten. But it was happy. The teachers were by and large kind. They weren't particularly brilliant intellectually, but they were kind. It was a simple life.

AM

Given your interest in romantic poetry and so on, were you keen on the countryside? Did you go for walks and collect eggs and things?

DS

Yes, I started a little bit of my later interest in birds at that point, because I had friends at school who were interested in birds. It wasn't all boys behaving badly. There were nice things about that. We had a very good headmaster, I have to say. He was a really interesting man and he was completely...

AM

This is at the primary school?

DS

At the primary school, yes. He lived down the street from us, Ernest Barber his name was. He was cut above the average for schools like that. He wanted me to put in for a scholarship to Gresham's. My mother, who was, as I said, something of a snob, I would have expected to jump at this like a fish after a fly. But in fact, she said no. She said, I'm not sending you away from home. It is interesting and I'm very grateful. I don't think I could have stood public school.

AM

I'm sure you would, but we'll talk about that later. I think I knew who the headmaster was too. So, the small grammar school. Were there any teachers there who particularly influenced you?

DS

There were indeed, and as it happens, I have just left him this morning. He came up for dinner yesterday. His name is Brian Davis and he was a wonderful English teacher. That's really how I ended up reading English, because I had planned to be a historian and I thought I might perhaps be a geographer as I liked faraway places, still do. But the teaching was so intellectually superior. The teaching that he offered was so much superior intellectually to anything else on offer that it was irresistible.

AM

What was his background?

DS

He...I just learned a lot more about this than I knew actually in the last 24 hours. He came from North London. His father had a quantity surveying business. His was not an academic family, but he is musically gifted. He wanted to go to Cambridge, and so he did. He went to Magdalene, which is where I went. He encouraged me.

AM

And you read English at Magdalene?

DS

Yes.

AM

It must have been about the time that C.S. Lewis was...

DS

It was. But Of course, in those days, professors didn't dirty their hands with undergraduates. I was taught by others, but yes, Lewis was there.

AM

Interesting. He [Brian] taught you in the sixth form?

DS

He taught me before the sixth form. I can't remember exactly when it started, but somewhere around the fourth, fifth maybe, through A-levels.

AM

How is it that... I mean, I know the answer, but it's interesting. How is it that he, with a degree from Cambridge and so on, ended up as a grammar school master?

DS

He tried one or two other things. He thought he'd have a go at teaching, just to see how it went. He started out in a... He told me yesterday, this is really fresh news to me, in Maidstone Grammar School, and he applied for a job in Norfolk because he thought he'd try a smaller school, and he found himself very happy there for the rest of its history, before it became a comprehensive. Norfolk held out quite a while with the old grammar schools, longer than other places, and so the comprehensive system didn't hit Swaffham until quite late. At that point, Brian looked for another job.

AM

What was so inspiring about his teaching?

DS

Well, it was the classic open-mindedness and intellectual precision, the classic virtues of any teacher, to be absolutely clear and absolutely undemanding of respect for the sake of respect alone.

AM

Was there a special part of English that he was most exciting on?

DS

He was good for everything. We did odd things. We did a paper on the Victorians, for 'A' level for instance, so I'm one of the few people who read Anthony Trollope before his 50th year. And yeah, you did the syllabus, but he chose interesting things. Everything he taught, he had something interesting to say about. And he was so respectful of [the] boys. He never had discipline problems, the way that some teachers did, and he had no traits of sadism or any desire to profit at the boy's expense.

AM

Were you taught as I was by my wonderful, inspiring English master and history masters at my school, in a kind of Oxbridge manner? In other words, he would say, write an essay on Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' and come back in a week, have a look at this and that, and then you went to the library, and read it out to him?

DS

No, that's more like the supervision system here. No, it was more of a classroom. He certainly read the essays and marked them and commented on them, but it wasn't quite that much to and fro. But when I stayed on for S-level and the Cambridge entrance, there was more of that, because in those days you still took the entrance exam.

AM

One of the things that happened around the age of 15 to me and many people in England was that they were confirmed, and this was the time of maximum religious fervour, so to speak. I was an evangelical for a while and so on. Can you tell me what part religion has played in your life?

DS

I can, but it isn't religion, that is to say the impingement of religion on my life. My mother had promised when she married my father that she would have the children raised Catholic. So when she came to England, she went and knocked on the door of the Catholic priest and he basically accused her of being the whore of Babylon, for marrying a Protestant and losing her faith. She was very upset, and my father got very angry and went down there and gave him a piece of his mind, apparently. The result was I was christened a Protestant in the Church of England, because my father knew the vicar and liked him. But that's, of course, before my conscious memories began. I was in the church choir for a while, as were all my friends. I loved the singing. I had no feeling at all for the metaphysics. It was a period of such uninhibited and glorious mischief that I still think about it and chuckle. It was just innocent bad behaviour, constantly. How to annoy the vicar, how to make noise in church, how to do all these things. It was so bad that he eventually disbanded the choir and hired what we then described as a ‘bunch of girls.’ But anyway, no, to be honest, I've never had any serious religious thoughts or curiosity whatsoever.

AM

How then do you identify with Wordsworth?

DS

Well, not through that. Wordsworth's religion is a complicated question. We don't need to talk about that. Wordsworth for me was not so much the nature Wordsworth, though my own feelings about nature run in parallel with Wordsworth, but not through him. He does not help me read nature, but I read nature in a way that perhaps is very similar to his. Wordsworth for me is the poet of human encounters, probably [the] supreme poet of human encounters. I have a much more anthropological view of his work and the importance of his work. I think it's quite unique. There are poems that no one else but Wordsworth could have written. They're all about meeting people on the highway, saying something or someone saying something to you and triggering a thought. I think they're extraordinary and those are the ones that have sustained me far more than the light of setting suns or something far more deeply interfused.

AM

Interesting. We'll come back to Wordsworth. So you would describe yourself as an agnostic or an atheist?

DS

I have to say an atheist because agnosticism seems to me to make the assumption that there's a question to be asked. I don't see that there is. I think we have what we have. I think that would probably be better described as atheism.

AM

The other thing at school, by grammar school times, is other kinds of activities like sports.

DS

Oh yeah. I love football. I was not good enough to get obsessed with it or rather to play it obsessively. But I got the odd game in the school teams and appreciated that. Cricket I gave up after about the age of 11 because though I made a promising 11 runs, I got the ball in the face and I decided this was not for me. So when the boys in summer played cricket I skived off to the tennis courts. Music, however, was important and Brian had a lot to do with that. He did a lot to cultivate school music. And I had a wonderful violin teacher who had played with the London Phil. and had retired to teach boys in Norfolk. Music was very important. I was never, again, good enough to really be tempted to look for a career there. But I was good enough to go to the County Youth Orchestra and things like that. We played a lot of chamber music which I have taken up again when I can find people to play with.

AM

So you still do it?

DS

Yeah.

AM

And you did it at Magdalene obviously.

DS

I did but I didn't do much there because I did things off the record with friends. Some of my friends from the Youth Orchestra would meet up and play quartets but I had a terrible performance anxiety. I have no performance anxiety at all about standing on a lecture podium. But I am terrified of playing music in public on my own.

AM

Well on your own you mean in an orchestra?

DS

No, in an exposed way, playing any solos or anything like that. And even chamber music that I am not completely on top of makes me very, very nervous.

AM

Interesting. So what about other things like politics or debating?

DS

No, there was a debating society. I didn't do very much. It wasn't very active. Politics, I didn't really have any. I was sort of a rather conservative child I think. I had a good school friend, a very bright boy who went to Oxford to read Chinese. He was a kind of committed socialist. That's where of course I ended up but at that time I don't think I really had much of a feeling for it. The things that now seem to me utterly wrong about the world didn't make much impression at the time.

AM

Interesting. And what were you mainly reading in those two or three last years of your grammar school? Which authors were you outside the syllabus?

DS

Right, right. Well, I honestly don't remember. I mean I certainly, I think I read most of Conrad, at a fairly early age. I read a lot of Hardy. Shakespeare obviously because that's part of the, you know, there's always more Shakespeare than is in the syllabus. You know, I can't tell you. I've always read and I've always read anything I could get my hands on and I don't remember particularly formative figures beyond those. I was also playing a lot of music, of guitar at the time. I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix, like most of my generation.

AM

You have a group?

DS

Yes. Well, I was a folk singer for a while and then only years later did we actually manage a group some later time in North Carolina. But, you know, it was just fun. It was fun. I was quite good as a 15 year old guitarist and that's where it stopped.

AM

What date was this?

DS

I came up in 1970, so this would be the '66 to '68, '69 sort of period.

AM

Post Beatles. So how is it that you came to Cambridge? Was it your master?

DS

Yes. Cambridge was the default place for the bright boys and they sent one every few years and occasionally two. And so it was always going to be Cambridge and I knew enough to know that the Cambridge English set up was more compatible with what I was interested in than the Oxford syllabus at that time. And then it was a matter of, well, which college do you apply for? I had no clue about any of that. But Brian again, since he'd been fairly happy at Magdalene, thought I might be too.

AM

And were you?

DS

Yes, I was. It was mixed. We were talking about it, he and I, and you know, there were difficult moments. I really suffered in my second year from noise at night because I lived in Mallory Court, which was across the road. And there were no adults there at night. So, you know, the boys, the students just kind of rioted would be one way to put it, just noise making in the middle of the night, chanting and marching around. It was very weird behaviour. And it kept me awake. And then I had another neighbour who would turn on the record player at midnight, very loud. And so between the two activities, I got almost no sleep and I was completely desperate. I went to the chaplain and I said, I can't survive another year if I [can’t] have a quiet room. And he found me one. It was a good place for me. I mean, it was not, you know, it was at that time, I like to say it was full of people whose parents had gone to the college. Public school boys who couldn't get into Trinity and the odd token grammar school boys. But they were trying to build on that, you know, trying to get more of the grammar schools...

AM

They had the reputation of people doing sort of estate management and land economy and quite conservative.

DS

Yes, it was. But, you know, it had just come out of the 60s and they'd had their share of drug taking and long hair and all the rest of it. I couldn't have survived King's, I think, as a student. I think it would have just buried me.

AM

Interesting.

DS

But Magdalene, I knew where I stood. I knew what I was and what I wasn't.

AM

What year did you go out to Magdalene?

DS

1970.

AM

You would have come when I first came, so you would have stood it. I would have been here from '71. Apart from the English, well, let's go back to the English. Were there any particular lecturers or supervisors who influenced you a lot as an undergraduate?

AM

Yes, indeed. George Steiner has to be mentioned. He was an absolutely charismatic lecturer. And more to the point, or as much to the point, he ran a kind of social event. So, you know, even if George was off form, and he never was, you could sit next to the good looking girls or something. It was packed. Lady Mitchell Hall was packed for Steiner's lectures. And of course, the faculty hated it because they thought he was anti-intellectual. It just meant that he was a comparatist instead of a, you know, Brexiteer who believed in British for the British. It's true, the names that were dropped were seldom analysed in any detail. But the fact that they were dropped at all was sort of inspiring. And, you know, you went away thinking, well, I'd better look into this Heidegger fellow, this Adorno fellow, this Walter Benjamin. You wouldn't hear those names from any other lecturers. Maybe Raymond Williams, but not so much. So George was definitely the star of the show. He was fantastic. And other lecturers, long before I came to know and love Tony Tanner, I went to his Conrad lectures and they were brilliant. I went to every one.

AM

You mentioned, the name has already gone out of my mind, but the socialist, Raymond Williams.

DS

Raymond Williams, yes.

AM

Did you go to his lectures?

DS

Yes. Yes, I did.

AM

Interesting?

DS

They were, I always like to think it's the charisma of boredom or boring charisma. He had the most remarkable and relentless ability to construct endless sentences with all sorts of subordinate clauses.

AM

Other people in King's can do that.

DS

Yes, you're just desperately waiting for them to end. But what you got was very often a digest of the next book, you know, and when the book was good, and the particular one I think he was rehearsing in my time was 'Marxism and Literature', which is a good book. And so that was exciting. But Raymond had an aloofness [so]that I never felt, you know, I could really approach him in any kind of way, intimate way. He did agree to supervise my dissertation when I came back, but it ended up he didn't.

AM

What was that couple, famous English literary couple, he wrote 'The Great Tradition'?

DS

Oh, Leavis, yes.

AM

Was he retired?

DS

No, Leavis had retired. I saw Leavis lecture once as a kind of return from the dead experience, you know. He talked to the English Association. I heard Empson too in the same sort of format. And I had the good fortune to be cooked lunch by I.A. Richards, which I can tell you about if you want or not.

AM

Yes, quickly.

DS

But no, Leavis had gone, though Leavisism was alive and well and of course produced an awful schizoid situation in the faculty, which eventually drove me out.

AM

Yes, which we'll come to.

DS

Richards was... this happened later, I didn't know Richards at the time, Richards was still in America. But I met Richards later.

AM

Apart from the formal studies, what else were you doing as an undergraduate?

DS

A little bit of music, as I described.

AM

Rowing?

DS

I did have a go at that. It was a late start for me, but I did enjoy it. I did that for a year or two in the fourth boat, I think occasionally the third, which at Magdalen is pretty well down the roster, you can imagine. So, yes, I had a serious girlfriend, whom I hung on to, as one did, in a largely male society at that time.

AM

Was she younger?

DS

No, no, she was a contemporary.

AM

Undergraduate?

DS

Yes. And she lived in America, her father lived in America, he was a Harvard professor, although they were English. I went to spend a summer there and that was very formative for me, because it was my first experience of America, a very positive one. And of American birds, too. And, yeah, so what else did I do?

AM

Did you do any drama?

DS

No, I didn't care for the theatre crowd much.

AM

It was a famous time for the theatre crowd.

DS

It was, it was, but they were much too... the theatre kids were always on stage, they never let up, and I couldn't keep up with that. I was a bit more introspective, I think.

AM

And politics?

DS

No, I joined the Union, I went on the odd demo, which in those days was the Greek junta and...

AM

You weren't in the Garden House?

DS

No, no. That was, I think, was it the year before or the year I arrived? I had a good friend from the Norwich Orchestra who was much more involved in all of that, but I really wasn't. I remember the occupation at the Senate House.

AM

It was the Vietnam...

DS

It was, yeah.

AM

You went on the famous anti-Vietnam protests?

DS

No. Again, I think I was a bit immature politically. I think I hadn't really thought things through or felt what place I was in.

AM

And what was your strongest positive memory of those three years?

DS

Gosh, there were lots. I think the solitary, and here is very Wordsworthian, the solitary immersion in books, novels and poems particularly. And the sociability, I think, was real. I had enough friends that I could feel comfortable and accepted by [them].

AM

So after your undergraduate degree, what happened?

DS

Well, Magdalene very kindly gave me a scholarship to go to America. They had an exchange scholarship at the University of Michigan designated for Magdalene, and they gave it to me. And that was a very interesting and important year, and probably important to my political consciousness in a way that nothing else had been because it was the end of the Vietnam War, moving toward the end of the Vietnam War and also the impeachment of Richard Nixon. And I became aware at Michigan of Native American rights and things like that that I [had] never thought about. And so in that sense, it was a real eye-opener. It was an eye-opener intellectually. I read the Romantic Poets for the first time in Michigan. I had never read them at school, seriously, and I never read them at Cambridge.

AM

How strange.

DS

Isn't it? That you can ace the Cambridge...

AM

They were at Cambridge.

DS

Well You can ace the Cambridge Tripos, in my case at least, without reading either Milton or Wordsworth, seriously.

AM

Really?

DS

That's how weird it was, the so-called coverage, you know. And these, of course, are two of the most important poets for the rest of my life, Milton and Wordsworth. But I think perhaps it was good that I saved them. But anyway, Michigan was a huge shot in the arm in that sense. And I had two years' money, but I came back after a year because I didn't have enough money. The scholarship didn't cover much beyond accommodation, really. And I also was ready to write my PhD, so I just wanted to get on with it.

AM

What was the subject of it?

DS

It's called 'Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry'. And it was about just that, how concepts of authority are undercut by strategies of irony, displaced speakers, dialogic modes, and all the rest of it. Basically, the things I've been interested in all my life were all there in that first book, as they so often are. But just not padded out, you know. And anyway, I was ready to just get on with it, and Cambridge is a wonderful place for just getting on with it, if you know what you're doing. It can be a terrible place if you don't, but I was lucky.

AM

Who was your superhero?

DS

Well, I had applied to work with Williams, and he wrote and said he would do it.

AM

That was Raymond Williams?

DS

Yes.. because at that time, I thought I might be interested in romantic drama. But I discovered, basically, Blake and Wordsworth afresh. And when push came to shove, I was assigned to someone I didn't know, who was John Barrell.

AM

Who was John Barrell?

DS

Formerly a fellow here. And John was a fabulous supervisor, because he... I don't think we met more than three or four times academically, in the whole time I was writing my dissertation. But if ever I needed help, he was absolutely there. He never pestered me, but if I needed help, he was absolutely there.

AM

Did he read your..?

DS

Yes, he did.

AM

And commented?

DS

Yes, yes. He was just perfect for me. A perfect supervisor relationship. And so, yeah, I was two years into that, when I got the job here at King's, which is quite a story in itself.

AM

Right, yeah. So, John Barrell. What was his reputation and ability like? I don't know much about him.

DS

When I met him, I had no idea, because he had come to the faculty while I was here as an undergraduate, but I never... I think around the time, perhaps ... no, he must have come in the year that I was away, because I didn't know him at all. And he was here. He'd been made a fellow here. So I didn't really know anything about him at all at the time.

AM

I haven't read anything about him, but I know of his reputation vaguely. He went to Sussex, didn't he?

DS

He did. He started out at Essex, I think, and then he came here, and then after the faculty meltdown, he went to Sussex, and he spent the last years of his career at York.

AM

And what if you had to summarise, as you do in the precis at the beginning of a PhD, what the argument was of your PhD, what was it?

DS

Hmm. I haven't read it, of course, since 1979. Okay. Argument. I could summarise it now in a way that I probably couldn't have then, you know, as being an interest in evasive interpretive strategies that held back from determinate or exclusive meanings and attributions of meaning in such a way as to both stimulate reader response in a kind of democratic way, but also avoid political accountability in a sort of legalistic way. So it was a curiosity about the poetics of evasiveness, if you like, but also the poetics of maieutics, you know, the bringing forth of meaning as the responsibility, not simply of the writer but of the reader. So it was soaked in literary theory and, you know, all that stuff.

AM

And who were they? I mean, I would have assumed it was the satirists of the early 18th century that would be the stars.

DS

No, Blake was really the kind of the fons et origo, he was the person who got me thinking about this procedure, and then I started finding it everywhere. So the book has really... got a lot of Wordsworth in it, it's got a lot of Blake in it, it's got a lot of Keats in it.

AM

Does Wordsworth use a lot of irony?

DS

Well, in my terms, yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, lines that you have to think about, or encounters that don't explain themselves, but you have to make [into] meaning. You know, "reader had you in your heart such..." what is it “ something a silent thought can bring, "oh gentle reader you would find a sense in everything..", something like that. I haven't got that quite right, but...

AM

"Do lie too deep for tears... and so forth.

DS

Yes.

AM

I see. One trite observation I used to make to friends was that irony is born of political power and the need to attack it indirectly, and this is why British irony is so good, because there's enough freedom to do this. On the other hand, there was enough governmental power to make it dangerous, and that's why America doesn't have irony.

DS

It could be. Well, you know, irony is a subject that people have written a lot and thought a lot about, and Kierkegaard was another important figure for me, by the way, on that score. But there's the irony in which you end up sort of knowing where you stand, like the irony of Pope, and then there's the irony where you end up not knowing where you stand, what Solger, I think, [or maybe Schelgel] called indeterminate irony, and it's the second that I was most interested in, the irony that allows you to avoid being accountable or to plead that you're always somewhere else when the crime occurred. And that, I think, is much more typical of what I thought of as romantic irony, and it is, of course, a reaction to censorship, but then censorship had been around for a long time. In fact, there was less of it than there had been before, so you can't explain it just by that. It's an epistemological shift, and it has something to do with the larger currents of social democracy, but [that] isn't the sole answer.

AM

So the PhD proceeded smoothly, and you...

DS

Yes, well, at the end of... I got the job here at the end of my second year of writing the PhD.

AM

As an assistant lecturer?

DS

It was a college job. I'll tell you about that in a minute. I was really under the cosh because in my first year, '76, I was a mere 25 years old, and I was simultaneously trying to finish a dissertation and learn to teach, and it was very stressful. I threw my heart and soul into the teaching, and I was wrecked at the end of the first quarter... First term, I practically had a nervous breakdown, at least the nearest I've ever come to [one], and I was exhausted. But it was a positive [experience after all]

AM

You weren't director of studies as well?

DS

Not yet. I became that later. But I had a college job, and it was... They were called NUTOs in those days.

AM

They still are.

DS

No, it's CUTOs now. Oh, no, college teachers... CTOs, they're called. NUTOs was regarded as a little kind of biologically brutal, I suppose. And it was a very controversial... I don't know if you remember any of this, but it was a very controversial subject. King's did not ever tenure NUTOs because the Bursar at the time, a lovely man, Ken Pollak, whom I adored but disagreed [with] on this, was very leery of having the college burdened with a lifetime salary for someone who was not going to get a faculty job. And the pattern actually was that if you hung around long enough, you'd eventually get one, as various people did. Gareth, for instance, did. But I didn't want to hang around. Anyway, they did actually give me tenure because I got an offer from Trinity, and the Trinity job carried a lifetime appointment. Bernard was the Provost then. And then King's came up and gave me a lifetime appointment. It was very generous. And I imagine if I had stayed, if things had been otherwise, I would have eventually served my time and been given a faculty job.

AM

But what was it that you liked about King's then?

DS

Oh it was fantastic. I mean, colleagues really was the main thing, not just the English people, but the whole fellowship. People were terribly, I mean, my first months here were hard. Dan Brown, another lovely man, was Vice Provost. And I was bit, I was out on my ear because I had no place to live for the summer. And the fellowship [only] started in October, but he found me a room in college for the summer. So I was here, as it were, before my time. And I was allowed to use high table and I would go in because there was no kitchen or anything. So I'd go and eat at high table. And at that time, it was one or two other people in the middle of summer, one of whom I found very intimidating and not the least bit...

AM

Wynne Godley?

DS

No, no, I liked Wynne. No, Wynne was very amiable. No, it was a man called Gwill Owen, a classical philosopher. And I think he was probably a shy man, but at the time it looked like he was just slightly overbearing and not really interested in anyone else. And so I sat there and eating my dinner and I didn't feel at all right. I thought this is not a place for me, you know. And this persisted more or less until everybody came back for the autumn term and then I met a lot more people. Ken Moody was very kind to me. I want to mention that. He somehow figured out that I was not settled in. We're both birdwatchers. And so he said, have you got a free day? Let's go up to Cley. So we went up to Cley for the day birdwatching in his old Triumph Herald, I think it was. And he said, you know, I've noticed you're not too happy. And he said, you know, give it time. And he was so right. It was very kind of him.

AM

I worked very closely with Ken.

DS

Yes. Yes, I know you did.

AM

And there was a nice interview with him.

DS

Yes, I saw part of it. Yes, most of it actually. Anyway, you're asking, you know, the fellowship was more, I loved being able to walk in and ask a classicist a question or a sociologist a question, you know, and get real answers. It was fabulous learning experience. Ross Harrison was very helpful when I was working on the philosophical stuff for my second book. And it was great, great experience. I think that time of life intellectually is very exciting wherever you are. It was particularly exciting in a place like King's where you had so many kinds of expertise around the table. You didn't have to...

AM

Do you get that in America?

DS

No, there's nothing like it in America. That was one of the big losses of leaving.

AM

Could they have created it if they had created a proper collegiate system? I mean, Harvard tried, but...

DS

Yeah, they all have their, most of the big universities have their societies of fellows, but it isn't the same. It's a whole anthropology that's just not there. It's just not the same. There are some many, many good signs about the professionalization of intellectual life in the American university, which I've profited from and respect, but the companionate intensity of the fellowship is unique.

AM

You've mentioned two or three people. Who else over the years has been really someone you've really become friends with in this college?

DS

In this college? Well, a lot of them are still here. I mean, I keep up obviously with Pete, with Chris, with Ian.

AM

You'd better say their names. Pete?

DS

Pete de Bolla and Chris Prendergast and Ian Fenlon. Ian and I were made fellows at the same time. Ross Harrison was on the committee that gave me the job, as was Tim Leggett, whom I was very fond of also. [Paul Ryan has been a lifelong friend]. [Likewise my colleagues in English] I had enormous affection and respect for Tess Adkins, who is now retired. This is her shared room. Indeed. I could go on. Geoffrey Lloyd and John Henderson were great pals. We used to play football together on a Saturday morning. And Tony Tanner, you mentioned. Tony, yes, of course. How could I forget? I adored Tony.

AM

And obviously.. were you a chapel goer?

DS

No. In fact, we were just saying yesterday, we've been to Evensong twice this week for various reasons. Just how wonderful it is. And all the time I was here, I hardly set foot in the place. In fact, when we took our oaths, there was a big debate among us young Turks about whether we would swear to uphold the value of education, religion, learning and research, or whether we would omit religion. And I cannot remember what we did. I think we omitted religion. Nobody minded.

AM

No. Well, Edmund was... Was Edmund Provost?

DS

Yes.

AM

Yes, he changed it into English anyway, the admission thing. And so he was against all this nonsense. So no one would have minded. In fact, I must have elected you.

DS

Pardon?

AM

I must have been on the fellowship electors and elected you.

DS

Really? '76?

AM

I think I stayed on because I elected Ian, I remember.

DS

Yes, you would.

AM

In the same election.

DS

Yes. Well, the story is interesting. Again, if you're interested in college lore, you've probably heard it before. But there was only one job up at King's, and it was going to go to Colin MacCabe. Colin got a faculty job. In the meantime, Lisa Jardine resigned and moved to Jesus, and Tony Tanner decided to move to Johns Hopkins. So suddenly, there were three holes instead of one. And by some sleight of hand, if not of genius, they managed to squeeze three appointments out of this one. Colin [was] paid by the faculty, and myself and Norman Bryson paid for by the college. Norman had been a Kingsman and was in the same pool of candidates. So it was a complete remake of English at King's, and Tony and John and Frank Kermode were still the senior echelon. It was very exciting. And we were, I think, it was perhaps not so good for us that we were quite such a smug and independent bunch who thought that the rest of the faculty were arrant fools. I suspect we did give that image, and that was unfortunate. But actually, some of them were. So, you know, it wasn't entirely...

AM

You mentioned Lisa Jardine. Do you know her well?

DS

Not well, no.

AM

What did you feel about her work?

DS

Well, she's not in my field, nor am I in hers. I don't know it terribly well. Margie [my wife] would give you a better answer. I liked the little I saw of her. But, you know, she went as I came, so we didn't really... And she didn't get on at King's. I don't know what happened, but she took against King's the way that people do sometimes. You know, I don't think she came back much. You may have that story in one of your interviews, I don't know.

AM

Probably. I did interview her.
So, after your... Where at King's from? Do you hear a strange...

DS

Construction, I think.

AM

Construction downstairs. This is what is always scheduled for when I'm doing interviews.

DS

Trying to stop your floor from falling out.

AM

Something like that. Making us a new kitchen. So, does this take us on to the reason you left King's?

DS

I suppose it does. I was angry and wounded at the treatment Colin got from the faculty.

AM

Tell us a little about that.

DS

Colin MacCabe. Did you know him?

AM

No.

DS

I don't know where to start really, but Colin is kind of [a] force of nature. He was hired to develop, indeed initiate, a modern version of the teaching of the English language, which he did with enormous diligence. He wrote the lectures, did all the reading, all that stuff, made himself able to do it. And was then promptly fired.

AM

Fired or not renewed.

DS

Not renewed. Yes, of course.

AM

He was an A assistant lecturer whose tenure wasn't renewed after three years. After...

DS

I think it was... Was it three or five? Three or five, yeah. I don't remember. It was certainly not renewed.

AM

And the reason was...

DS

Well...

AM

He wasn't doing his job properly or something?

DS

This is the stuff of novels. He was doing his job properly, but we had the onset of the so-called debate about so-called structuralism.

AM

Ah, yes.

DS

...Which was actually, if you had to give it a definition, post-structuralism. But never mind. It was foreign, it was French, and it wasn't us. And there was a faction in the faculty that really, really resisted anything that had a smatter[ing] of theory about it. And I'm afraid to say it was somewhat masterminded by Christopher Ricks. I'm not sure that, in my view, without him, the troops would have gathered under one flag. Because I don't think they were coherent enough, but they did. And Christopher...

AM

He was at Oxford.

DS

He was at Oxford, but he came to Cambridge as the second English chair after Kermode. And I think it was a kind of Billy the Kid situation. Christopher couldn't stand anybody else on the street with a loaded gun. And I think also it was attached to all kinds of social movements, to a kind of leftism, a kind of anti-authoritarianism, anti-traditionalism. And of course the students lapped it up. So I think a lot of the established faculty felt threatened. I won't name names. And I had some friends in the rest of the faculty, it's fair to say. But it was a horrible atmosphere, an absolutely horrible atmosphere. It really was King's against the world. And that was...

AM

It was Kings supporting him.

DS
Yes. In the case of Tony and John, I think with some courage, they took real risks and put their own careers on the line to do the right thing. And... Anyway, I just... I think it's personal. I was outraged ideologically, in principle, intellectually, if you like. But I was also angry, so angry. And I did not like living with that much anger. And I got so tired of sitting in the bar or the combination room, bemoaning the state of English faculty. And I thought, I've got to get out of here. And that's what happened.

AM

Can I psychoanalyse you a little bit?

DS

Yes, of course.

AM

Tell us about your constant arguments with your father. Confrontations and anger on both sides. And then you told us that the theme of your irony book and so on is about evasiveness in the face of force. And then you tell us that you got really angry in this situation, you couldn't cope with the anger. Is there a connection between those?

DS

Possibly so. I mean, there has to be, doesn't there? I mean, the anger with my father definitely resolved itself. We had a wonderful relationship for the rest of his life. And there was no bad feeling at all. I mean, when he died, I really felt we'd said everything, you know. The anger, the evasiveness, I'm still interested in. Because it is, of course, the core of literary pedagogy, traditional literary pedagogy. And that hasn't gone away. And I'm very interested in its relation to violence. My last two books are on violence. And I know you're interested in that too. And, yeah, I mean, I fear the anger. I think it was a righteous Blakean anger, but I'm not sure it was good for me or indeed anybody else. And I have felt that being happy has been as creative or more than being angry, to be honest. I don't know if that's... that's not exactly psychoanalytic, but it's how I feel about it.

AM

Yeah. Okay, well, you decided to leave. So you applied for jobs in America. And got what? A lectureship or...

DS

I went to Northwestern. And they made me... I was a full professor there in two years. So I got rid of all that anxiety.

AM

In your Wikipedia, it says that you then went on perhaps to Davis or somewhere. But it wasn't as a full professor.

DS

I don't think there is a Wikipedia. I've never done that. Anyway, you got it from somewhere.

AM

I got it from... you went to a university where you are now with a very important named chair. But at the beginning you were something which didn't say professor. It said faculty member or lecturer or something.

DS

Really? No, I had... after Northwestern, I went from one full professorship to another, various places, Columbia, Boulder and UC Davis. So I never had any worries about tenure after that.

AM

As we are now moving on perhaps to your later creative life, if you had to choose two or three of your essays or books that you would like to take up to your desert island and be remembered by, what would you choose and why?

DS

Which among us wants to read himself again? Not me. Okay, you mean which basically do I think are the most important? Well, I think 'Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory' is for me the summary of a lot of my early work and a book I still feel proud of.

AM

And what is the argument of that?

DS

It's about the ways in which during the French Revolution, theory became associated with the French. And of course, what we had in the 70s was a cacophonous response to French theory. But you could take it, you could take pieces of Edmund Burke and they look just like the faculty handouts in the 1970s, you know, 1980s. Yeah, the French were regarded as at once passionate and unreliable, but at the same time bloodlessly theoretical, you know, mechanical Jacobin intellects who had no feeling and no sympathy and no human dimension. And so you can trace a great deal of the Anglophone prejudice against methodological thinking in the humanities to the French Revolution. And my argument is that this was all wrapped up with a redefinition of nationalism, what it meant to be British. And you could see that happening all over again when people were kind of berating Levi-Strauss for being responsible for the decline of serious thinking about literature, you know, all that stuff.

AM

About what?

DS

The decline of serious thinking about literature because of people like Levi-Strauss. Even though Levi-Strauss was not the issue at that point. As I said, it was post-structuralism, very definitely. But anyway, yeah, so 'Romanticism, Nationalism, Revolt against Theory' would be one. I suppose the 9-11 book, which is one of the better sellers, not that it sold hugely, was on the culture of commemoration and it was stimulated by the sickening sentimentalization of the dead that followed the 9-11 experience and its memorialization in the New York Times and other places. And then I think the last two, certainly 'States of Terror' is a book that I feel strongly about, which is in a nutshell . . . there's many things. But I suppose a single core argument or single core insight would be that it's very important not to lose sight of the historical incidents of terror as a weapon of state, not a weapon of, you know, fiery radicals who are not in power. And so that was also a response to the post 9-11 climate in America, as well as elsewhere. We've got to stop talking about terrorism as the province of a barbarian fringe and start recognizing it as a principle of state governance, which of course is pretty much the history of the British Empire in my view. And then the last one, which I just came out in '23, '22, I think, or was it '21? Anyway, called 'Engaging Violence, Civility and the Reach of Literature'. And that's again a book I feel happy to have written.

AM

What is the argument in that?

DS

Well, I had a longstanding interest in civility. In the 1980s, if you remember, the kind of romance of the round table that was going on in philosophy and sociology around John Elster and other people. It was the end of the Soviet Empire and the whole shtick was that the Russians didn't have civil society and we do, therefore they lost. So it was an interest in what civil society really is and what functions it enacts.

AM

It's civil society rather than civility in the sense of...

DS

They overlap. They overlap. I mean, there's a whole etymology there from civilitas meaning just simply political function in the state and civility as an ethic, a piece of culture. So I was interested in civility and then I dropped all that because of the 9-11 stuff was so urgent to me I just started writing about that. And then I came back to it years later and I thought, well, this really still is of interest, you know, because you can still open the papers every three months and you'll find some editorial deploring the decline of civility. Now, civility, of course, is simultaneously expressive and permissive because it allows space for others to flourish and also repressive in the sense that it's an unannounced or undescribed code of behaviour which actually excludes people for being uncivil, you know, in some kind of unspoken way. So it has a bifocal function, all ways, I think. And I was interested in relating that to literary pedagogy, which is similarly premised on, as I said before, an openness to dialogic models where different views are aired. But because with literature it's a virtual experience, you're not in the real world, you're just reading as if you were, it's, in my view, a kind of safety valve or place for rehearsing arguments that you don't finally have to enact into forms of irreversible action. So that is at once the curse of literary studies in that we don't have a direct world input, but also its greatest virtue in the sense that it's a space for the rehearsal of possibilities without consequences. And I think Leavis understood that. I always thought Leavis was a force of darkness, but I think in this respect he was not. I think he understood that in the classroom, in the seminar, in the lecture room, forms of violence could be rehearsed that had no consequence. You just leave, and the world is the same as it was. And this preoccupation, I think, is at the core of the birth of practical criticism, actually. I.A. Richards is the hero of this moment for me. And that's the work I'm doing now, which may or may not be a book, I don't know, but it's work on the ways in which liberal elites have tried to use the educational system, particularly teaching literature, to inhibit the dissemination of violence. And I think Richards' career is exemplary in that respect, in every way. Not just his work on practical criticism in the Arnoldian tradition, but also his commitment to BASIC, to the international global English which he wanted to establish as a second language for everybody. And which, in fact, he was on the point, you may know this well, of getting the Chinese government to basically accept as a part of their national pedagogic apparatus.

AM

BASIC?

DS

British-American scientific international communication. Or is it commercial? I think it's commercial. Anyway, the second language with its 800 words and 18 verbs. And then the Japanese invaded China and everything stopped.

AM

It was as early as that, in 1937?

DS

Yes. Richards was in China at the time and had to basically get on a train rather swiftly. And I think Empson, who was there at the same time, actually spent time...

AM

Oh yes, and Auden as well.

DS

Pardon?

AM

And Auden was there at the same time.

DS

Was he? Oh, I didn't know that.

AM

He went with Empson, and the book they wrote..

DS

Okay, I didn't know that. I think Empson may have spent time in the mountains with the Chinese resistance.

AM

And Edmund Leach was there just shortly afterwards.

DS

Oh really? Anyway, it's a long answer to a good question, but maybe too long an answer. Yes, I mean, you asked what I thought. I mean, insofar as if we lived in a world where what I write had any importance, that's the importance I hope it would have.

AM

Coming back to Wordsworth and Coleridge, I mean, I was very intrigued that it wasn't the nature part and the mysticism and all that. How would you demonstrate that he was the most conversational, encountering kind of poet with other people? Or was it just that when he was wandering around those roads, he'd meet some other beggar and start talking to him? Or was there more than that in his poetry that shows that he was?

DS

I think what he communicates is the pervasiveness of miscommunication and therefore the difficulty of communication. The way in which the other person is actually deeply opaque to you and what you do about that. What thoughts does it make you give rise to? How do you feel about misunderstanding the other person? What are the moral obligations you have to the other person whom you don't know when you think you do? Part of it is social. Wordsworth is always talking to ordinary people. People [who] are not Cambridge-educated poets. Part of it is just, I would say, existential, almost in a kind of philosophic way. It's the kind of Levinas vocabulary. You're dealing with literally the opacity of the other. I think that's a tremendously important moral stance to recognize and accept that as your first premise and work from that. Not go around with the assumption of understanding or comprehension. I found Wordsworth morally stringent in a way that so many other writers are not.

AM

Why it puzzles me is that the poems I love most, like 'Tintern Abbey' or 'On Westminster Bridge', don't appear to have any of that in them.

DS

They don't. I agree. Wordsworth of course wrote an enormous amount, most of which now no one reads. But the great poems 1798 to 1807 are heavily centred on poems of encounter. As an anthropologist you've probably thought about this a lot. Your other is more obviously other than Wordsworth's, but it's still the same dynamic.

AM

Coming towards the end, you mentioned, I think, maybe it was in just some conversation about your family. Is there anything you'd like to say about your family and their influence on your life? I mean your married family.

DS

Oh, my current family, yeah. Well, I've been very happily [settled] with my wife. We met in 1987 in New York when I was at Columbia. So was she. And we almost instantly became parents out of wedlock and stayed happily out of wedlock [for some time].

AM

Your children know about this?

DS

Oh, yes, they do. And then we had two more. Margie wanted more children and it took us a while, but eventually we had two more. And at that point we thought we'd better get married just to kind of make it look right or not get in trouble with the tax people or whatever. So anyway, yeah, they've been wonderful. I never thought I wanted to be a father. I had no desire to have children. I can't imagine life without them now. It was a real transformation.

AM

I've thought of two last questions. One is about America. I'm writing various things into which America intrudes at times and I feel increasingly ambivalent about America.

DS

Rightly so.

AM

And indeed a number of my friends are thinking of leaving. What are the good and bad features of America?

DS

Well, for someone as interested as we are in violence, I think there's no question that this is an appalling tradition of violence that goes all the way back to the initial conquest of the Eastern [seaboard].

AM

Genocide?

DS
Yes. Yes. And, you know, racial cruelty is not just something that pops up in various unfortunate moments in American history. You know, the Tulsa riots and, you know, the post-slavery period, reconstruction. It's a constant. And I think Black people understand this and indigenous Americans certainly do. And I think if you are a serious historian, you have to understand that too. Donald Trump is not coming out of nowhere. Donald Trump is an emanation of a very deep and dug in American attribute. Resentment. Tocqueville is very good on this. The power of resentment and a tolerance of violence, a tolerance of guns in a way that, for instance, the Australians got rid of. Australia as a frontier culture. They were able to get rid of their guns. It's an absolute nonstarter in the US. And you can account for it by saying, well, it's the arms companies who didn't want to give up profits after the Civil War and all that. But it's more than that. And it's deeply troubling and scaring. Scary. On the other side, I mean, I fell in love with the American West on my first visit. That's why I moved to Colorado. And I still am in love with the American West, not the West of, you know, guns and cowboys, but the West of indigenous cultures and landscapes. And New Mexico is my favourite place in America, partly because it's tricultural. You know, it's not just white boys.

AM

And you collect Navaho...

DS

I do. Yes, I have a serious interest in weaving 19th century Navaho weaving. These days, I can't afford very much of it, but I do have some things that I'm very pleased to have. So, yeah, the good and the bad. And, you know, for it, for an emigre, there's also, you know, there's always a good in being somewhere where you didn't grow up, as well as a good in as well as a regret at not being where you grew up. And it's very freeing. The lack of class consciousness in America still seems to me a positive thing, not that they don't have all kinds of horrible forms of sniffing one another out and discrimination as we see writ large today. But that sense of, you know, classlessness is deep there. And I think it's changed here. I think, oddly enough, I have nothing much good to say about Margaret Thatcher, but I think one of the functions of the Thatcher regime was an odd onset of classlessness, which has resulted perhaps in, you know, the economy of city fortunes rather than any genuine egalitarianism, but has made Britain, has made England a much easier place to be than it was. I think I remember fellows of the college talking about the staff without any malice or conscious intention of cruelty as servants. ‘We must think of the effect on the servants’.

AM

Don't speak in front of the servant.

DS

That's right. You couldn't do that now. You wouldn't want to.

AM

Last question. You've written a lot, and are still writing a lot. Do you have any advice on or description of how you work?

DS

In a state of passionate concentration that makes me not think of anything else other than writing. And I am very lucky. So many of us have problems writing our thoughts down. Many who do what we do have real problems of self-censoring and second-guessing and all the rest of it. I've never had that. I just [write] constantly, it's like being in a trance. I just do it. And I revise very lightly. And I'm usually happy with what I've done. I never think of it as final, and I don't think of it as terribly consequential. So if it's not quite right, who cares? But I have noticed the last thing I wrote was much harder for me. It was an essay on tolerance called 'Tolerance from Below'. Interestingly enough with a lot of Wordsworth in it. And I'll spare you the details, but it was harder for me to write than the way I used to write. And I wondered if perhaps this is the ageing process. Something isn't quite what it was. Some life force isn't quite there any more. And of course it's compounded by the difficulty not only of getting older, but of seeing a world in which what we do seems to have less and less value as a social force than it ever did. Or at least it has in my lifetime. And the remarkable thing about the 1920s, all the horrors of the First World War, is that those people really felt they could change something. And I don't feel that any more.

AM

I think that's a very nice, or sad, or appropriate moment to end. So thank you very much.