I can remember listening to a conversation which took place outside the house of John Newton, one of my Cambridge supervisors. The only other person present was Harold Mason, who had been an editor of Scrutiny and a staunch collaborator of Leavis in the 1940s. Sometime in the mid-1950s, Mason had left Cambridge in order to teach English in Exeter but he had recently reappeared as the holder of the F. R. Leavis Lectureship. This was a post that Newton and others had succeeded in establishing after there had been a public appeal for the necessary funds. The idea was that, with his retirement imminent, there should be some way of continuing Leavis's work in Cambridge, the reasonable assumption being that most of those with power and influence in the university would be only too pleased to see the back of him. But the appointment of Mason did not meet with Leavis's approval, and still less with that of his wife, so that the result was a degree of acrimony exceptional even by the high standards Cambridge set in these matters.

I am reasonably sure of the date of this conversation because Newton and Mason were discussing a memoir which John Holloway, one of the members of the Cambridge Faculty, had just published. To say that Holloway was on Leavis's black list would not do much to distinguish him since that was true of most of those who held permanent posts in the English Faculty in the early 1960s. When I was his pupil, there were very few of his colleagues for whom he had a good word. He would occasionally point wryly to himself and say cet animal est méchant, optimistically assuming that his hearers would be able to complete the quotation. It took me a while to realise that these words were the beginning of a French witticism which continues quand on l'attaque, il se défend, and certainly there were always those willing to cast the first stone. In 1956, about ten years before the incident I am recalling, Holloway had given a couple of talks on the BBC's third programme called ‘The New “Establishment” in Criticism’ and complained that ‘the regime of close reading’ had become mechanical and was not in any case applicable to long works.