Friedman would sometimes say: 'You can advocate this so long as you believe that the state should decide for the individual.' I regretted the lack of embarrassment of too many other people at this charge. An example was Prof. Denis Robertson (once commended in the Peterborough column of the Daily Telegraph for not having followed Keynes 'hook, line and sinker'). Robertson was prepared to countenance surprising policies for a classical liberal. At a session of the Political Economy Club he vigorously defended the right of County Agricultural Committees to dispossess supposedly inefficient farmers; 'and more power to their elbow', he added.

Outside the macro sphere, Cambridge economies still stemmed from Alfred Marshall, a quintessentially Victorian Cambridge figure whose Principles of economics was first published in 1890. Even Keynes revered Marshall, although he also mocked him: and Friedman remarked that if the Principles had come out in the 1950s they would have been hailed as the best advanced textbook on price theory - quite extraordinary for a subject claiming to be a science.

My extracurricular activities in Cambridge were too much concerned with the Labour Club and with the Union (an undergraduate debating society). 'Too much' because I was not really cut out for either politics or public speaking. I did, however, make one successful address at the Union, giving the lead speech in favour of the motion 'This house would rather be red than dead'.

My time at Cambridge also saw the last fling of the aesthetic snobs before the 1960s arrived. Most students interested in the arts - and also the 'funny' speakers at the Union - had a term 'drear' which they flung at anyone with serious political or intellectual interests. I should perhaps have called this account 'Recollections of a Drear'.

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