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would get an occasional lecture by one. Most of the actual teaching was done by graduate students working on their own Ph.D.'s. They needed the money and the universities wanted cheap labor. I felt there was a dreadful snobbery as well, especially among the students. The biggest surprise to me was the discovery that so few American students could write. In Europe, it is impossible to get into a university unless you can write your own language. There are no beginning courses in writing taught at university level. Nearly all work is delivered in the form of the essay. My life on the continent was most enjoyable. There was at that time - the 1970s - no sense of urgency and no sense of "what kind of job will I get after I finish?" Perhaps that has changed, but it was most refreshing at the time. By contrast, many of the American students I met thought of little else (apart from the likes of 
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Christopher Bernard, but we know all about him, don't we?). Studying at Cambridge was both extremely rewarding and great fun as well, but for rather different reasons. It does indeed live up to its reputation but not in the way one might expect. Tradition and history are very strong, and it is difficult not to be both awestruck and intimidated by it. This year the university celebrates its 800th anniversary. My own College was founded in 1348, and our neighbor, Trinity (200 years our junior), boasts some rather interesting members of the College: Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Tennyson, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Betrand Russell, John Dryden, Byron, James Clerk Maxwell, Wittgenstein, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Ralph Vaughan Williams, etc., to name but a tiny handful. Kim Philby was there as well, of course. (Philby was one of the handful of Communist spies recruited at  |
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