There have been no dramatic changes in my standpoint since then, but mainly evolution, investigation, elaboration and endeavours to disseminate and recycle.

I spent a year in 1973-74 as a temporary Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and in 1978 a semester at Chicago University (although based on the Law School, not the Economics Faculty). My main gain during this period was in contacts, ideas for further reading and so on, rather than in any specific work which I undertook then.

My tendency to get lost when trying to follow a mass of symbolic computations has long haunted me. When I took my degree at Cambridge I decided at the last moment to add public finance to political theory and applied economic statistics as a third optional subject, knowing that the two best would count. There was a similar syndrome at Nuffield. On Friday nights there was an econornics seminar which could be on a wide variety of topics, provided that the treatment was sufficiently mathematical. On the same evenings there were more immediately appealing seminars, for instance David Butler's on Modern British Politics, where I once had to hold the fort because of the late arrival of Harold Wilson. Even seminars on British Commonwealth History seemed more appealing than the technical economic ones. Yet there was an unspoken assumption by the economic Fellows that unless I attended their advanced sessions I was just a dilettante.

I was at first surprised to be asked about economic matters by academics in other subjects within earshot of great economic authorities. It was only afterwards that I realized they were afraid of being fobbed off or having their heads bitten off by these very authorities. The low point was reached when I met at dinner a crew-cut young American who told me that his seminar had been 'on convexities'. (A convex curve bulges outwards. One was expected to know the economic context from the mathematical shorthand.) Later still I gave a talk at Warwick (where I had become a visiting professor of Politics) on such matters as the relative credibility of money supply and exchange rate targets and the role of an independent central bank. I was followed by a celebrated specialist visitor who was preparing to fill the board with symbols. He was talking about credibility: which I thought I had already been doing under a different title.

During these years I was frequently embarrassed by the appalling rudeness of my supposed allies among the monetarists. Somewhat earlier I attended a dinner organized by the patiently enquiring Geoffrey Crowther, a former editor of The Economist, to bring himself up to date on the debate between floating and fixed exchange rates. On the fixed rate side was Harold Lever, Labours engaging financial expert and later Cabinet adviser to Wilson and Callaghan. On the floating side were Harry Johnson and myself. It would have been better to have heard either of us alone. For I had to defer to Johnson, who was not only my senior in every sense, but from whom I had derived many of my own ideas on the subject. Yet instead of presenting the case in a straightforward way, he started attacking Harold Lever, almost personally, unwisely challenging Lever's competence and showing annoyance at having to debate with him. Afterwards Lever said to me: 'I am sorry if I annoyed Harry. Any apology should have been the other way round.

On one occasion, Keynes's distinguished collaborator, the late Richard Kahn, was publicly attacked for writing articles for The Times not based on journal articles 'refereed' by other economists. On another occasion I had to listen at coffee to a still-unconvinced Oxbridge economist being abused by an American monetarist along the lines of 'Why should I explain it to you?' Not that the unconverted British mainstream were without spots. Their favourite attitude was to be puzzled, to 'not understand' and to treat the monetarists with not merely intellectual, but even a touch of social, condescension.

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