Battling for Britain Prussian style

During my first term at Oxford in 1938, when walking down the south side of the Christ Church quad, I passed a large man in a bowler hat and a smart London suit. The only persons in the college who wore bowlers were the porters and most dons followed David Cecil’s advice to dress in Oxford as if staying in a modest country house. The large man was clearly a man of importance but he seemed out of place. I was no wiser when told that he was Professor Lindemann, the owner of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a private bathroom in his college rooms, both unheard of luxuries for a don.

Adrian Fort traces his rise to eminence in this scholarly book which provides fascinating, if sometimes disconcerting, glimpses of the world of science and government in the 1930s and 1940s. Roy Jenkins has remarked on Churchill’s penchant for bizarre, even disreputable, friends.