...Ryle And the thought came flashin' through my mind "John's got him beat by mile". O those Sydney blues. --"Sydney Blues", composed by John Anderson, about Oxford philosophers

ONE OF MY MOST insistent memories of John Anderson's lectures on Metaphysics in 1949 has a dash of the Cold War in it. The course was on Samuel Alexander's Space, Time and Deity, philosophic Realism and the categories of the real.

It was a long way from the political dramas of that year--Mao's occupation of Peking or Stalin's blockade of Berlin. But the national Coal Strike came closer to home--or the university. It cut off coal supplies and so drastically reduced the electricity available for daily life that the government banned everything from trams to electric jugs. The strike also disrupted university life, not least by making evening lectures in Trinity term almost impossible.

(Although a day student, I sometimes attended evening lectures to catch up. They repeated the day lectures. Like several of my friends, I used to take a casual day job from time to time, as scullery man, cleaner, gardener or whatever, to make ends meet. This was before the era of student pensions and loans.)

John...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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