I have an unusually vivid recollection of the first time I met John Hall. I went to his flat in Chelsea to be interviewed – as I thought – to establish whether I might make a suitable lecturer for his Pre-University Course in Venice. However, when I arrived, he got straight down to the nitty- gritty of how many lectures I would be giving, what titles I had in mind, and so on. I must have been all of 25, and had never given a proper lecture – by which I mean one without a written text – in my life. In retrospect, it strikes me that John must have been mad, or at least that if his trust did not lead to total disaster, then that only proves that he is one of those truly rare people whose guardian angel puts in a lot of overtime.
The Venice Course – aka the John Hall Course – has been going since 1965, and has survived all the intervening economic lows, not to mention the vicissitudes of changing university entrance systems and a gradual sense that a ‘gap’ year partially spent in the Serenissima is a wimpy option if one’s friends are backpacking through some torrid zone or other.
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