I went up to Cambridge in 1952 on a history exhibition, having nearly spoilt my interview by saying that I liked the quadrangles. ('The quads are in Oxford. Here we have courts.') I took the path of least resistance and read economics, influenced by reports that psychology in Cambridge had a laboratory and physiological basis.

A near-contemporary, Walter Eltis, has written in his own intellectual odyssey that those who went on to study economics in their second and third years were then 'firmly convinced that they were among the privileged 80 a year who were learning economics in the world's leading university, which offered both the highest theory and the key to policies that worked.' I could not work myself up into the same elevated opinion. The Cambridge economics tripos was a spiral, the same subjects being covered in all three years, supposedly in more advanced fashion. I soon concluded that the Oxford PPE course (politics, philosophy, economics) was more civilized, and just as good for somebody later wanting to become a specialist economist.

I was given a thorough grounding in economic analysis by Peter Bauer, but I still reflected that the famous tutorial system in which individual tuition was given to one or two undergraduates at a stretch was surely a waste of the time of world-famous scholars. In my second year I was taught by Milton Friedman, then on a sabbatical at Cambridge, but not yet the celebrated leader of a particular school. Friedman proved a charming person; but at first I did not like being tutored by a far-out Republican and missing the true Cambridge Keynesian wisdom.

It was not until the first term of my third year that I went to 62 Grange Road, beyond the 'Backs', to study with that fount of left-wing Keynesian wisdom, Joan Robinson. As in the case of another lady of forthright, but very different, opinions, it was fatal to forget that she was a woman. She was then developing the ideas later embodied in her book, The accumulation of capital (Robinson 1956). Her point was that the marginal productivity theory could not be used to explain the distribution of the national income between capital and labour, because it was impossible to measure capital independently of labour. She then proceeded, however, to rebuild the theory with the aid of a complicated saw-tooth diagram which became a bookmark in the published volume. I puzzled whether the theory was meant to be a rough approximation to how a capitalist economy works, or whether its purpose was to show that such an economy could not work because of the highly unrealistic assumptions required. The same question has arisen decades later with modern general equilibrium theory (see Brittan 1995d). Later I discovered that Friedman had been frozen out of the long-established 'secret seminar' where the new ideas on capital were discussed and where he could surely have helped by cutting through some of the mathematical problems.

Joan Robinson did have some individual words of wisdom for many of her pupils. Those I received were, 'You have plenty of good ideas; but they come to you in a muddle and you need help in sorting them out.' Unfortunately, I have rarely received that sort of help and have had to do the sorting myself. Later in my third year I was supervised by Harry Johnson, who was a genuine prodigy - on the surface flashy and Americanized - and not yet the feared economic personality he later became. He was the supervisor from whom I probably derived most benefit

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