I arrived back in Cambridge to find that Leavis had become what might now be called a celebrity. In my first two years, I had often been made aware that there were circles in which he was well known. Asked by certain people where I was studying English, I had only to tell them Downing to see a wary glint appear in their eyes. But these were a minority in the know whereas now everyone I met seemed familiar with his name. The reason was the text of one of his lectures which had appeared in The Spectator and been followed by an avalanche of mainly hostile correspondence. As his students, it was not only indirectly that we were implicated. In one letter to The Spectator, for example, there was an explicit reference to us as ‘a band of analphabetics who, young and foolish, applaud his cold contempt for writers he does not understand’ while, in another, the world was told that we did not need to read extensively because ‘Dr. Leavis knows which are the good books worth reading’. When one correspondent wrote that Leavis could have been cheerfully left alone in his ‘lower middle-class Bethel’ were he not someone who exerted a great deal of influence, we also felt ourselves targeted.

The cause of all this fuss was a lecture which had been given in Downing in February 1962, while I was still in France. It was part of a series established in honour of a naval historian who had been a previous master of the college, Admiral Sir Herbert William Richmond, and Leavis may have been invited to give this particular one because he was about to retire. He later claimed that it was largely a college affair and that he only passed a full text on to The Spectator because misleading accounts of the occasion had been leaked to other parts of the press. His subject was ‘The Two Cultures’, the title of another lecture which had been given more than two years previously by C. P. S now, a fellow of Downing's near neighbour Christ's and someone who, after being involved in important scientific research, had gone on to become a prominent government advisor, but also a best-selling novelist.