As the end of my three year studentship approached, my Ph.D. was still far from finished. This was a common situation at the time when many graduate students used their grant money for the acquisition of a more general education and treated the writing of an actual thesis as a side-show. In a way which would be impossible for their equivalents today (when the authorities are much more anxious to see an ‘outcome’ for their money), they indulged themselves in a great deal of reading which, from the point of view of finishing the Ph.D. on time, could accurately be described as ill-directed. If they were like me, only later and as they began teaching did they begin always to read with a distinct purpose in mind (a class, lecture, an article) until they eventually found themselves unable to pick up any book without some lurking ulterior motive. ‘Why am I reading this?’ is a question I don't remember asking myself very often in those days. Perhaps I took some bogus comfort from a striking remark made by Henry James, which was sometimes held up to us. This occurs in his 1872 review of a History of English Literature, after James has imagined its author, Hippolyte Taine, deciding to fulfil his commission handsomely by devoting to it five or six years and spending an equivalent number of months in England. ‘He has performed his task’, James writes, ‘with a vigour proportionate to this sturdy resolve; but in the nature of the case his treatment of the subject lacks that indefinable quality of spiritual initiation which is the tardy consummate fruit of a wasteful, purposeless, passionate sympathy’. This is well put and says something important about Taine's brisk, businesslike manner; but to apply it to the many wasteful, purposeless hours I spent as a research student would be too flatteringly optimistic.

The approaching end of the scholarship meant that I needed a job and I therefore began applying for one. In comparison once more with the situation today, when several articles, a doctorate completed and a book on the way is the going rate, I had desperately little to offer.