Hilaire Belloc invaded my little world when, as a first-year Arts student in Sydney, I read The Path to Rome. That does not mean, of course, that it was in the syllabus: authors in those conservative days were academically disqualified for life, and for a long time after their death. Incidentally, I learnt something from this book that influenced my outlook, or happily coincided with it, throughout my teaching career. Belloc, in his wisdom, had condemned intellectual pride and made it clear that many things besides cold analysis are involved in the acquisition of scholarship.

‘Here are we’, he wrote, ‘with the jolly world of God all round us … and we are to take one miserable little faculty, our one-legged, knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned, underfed and grumpy intellect, or analytical curiosity rather (a diseased appetite), and let it swell till it eats up every other function? Away with such foolery.’