There is an all-subsuming disposition, which we call grief. Some of us deny that grief is a quality of mind, and treat it as a morbid condition that must be cured. Yet mourning for loss is as much a part of the human experience as the inferiority complex, aggressive impulses, lust for ownership, irrational anxiety, love of beauty, or fear of death. Grief is always just beneath the surface, just behind the façade, affecting bright minds and dim, although its ominous shadow is often discernible only to those who know to look for it. When Cyril Radcliffe was in his 60s he told Warden Sparrow, ‘The great majority of the people that I grew up with and loved did not live to be 20.’ He spent a lifetime in mourning, and was exemplary of the thoughtful, apprehensive, sorrowing conservatism that I have charted in earlier chapters. Grief, as Radcliffe and his kind knew, percolates every filter.

His accomplishments were remarkable. After ten years’ practice at the Chancery bar he took silk in 1935. For nine months of 1940 he was Controller of News and Censorship at the wartime Ministry of Information: the soubriquet of Censor suited him, for he had an affinity with both the Censors of ancient Rome and with those of Christ Church, Oxford who supervised other members of their college and settled the trickier management of collegiate business. From 1941 until 1945 he was a resounding success as Director General of the Ministry. In 1947 he was appointed Chairman of the two boundary commissions charged with settling the frontiers between India and Pakistan. Two years later, in 1949, he was appointed as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. He was the first man since Macnaghten in 1887, other than former law officers, to step straight from the bar to the House of Lords judiciary. He retired as a Lord of Appeal after 15 years in 1964: a figure of somber distinction who, in the presentment of Martin Duxbury, ‘is often, and justly, lauded as one of the great legal minds of the twentieth century.’