Like many others, I first got to know about—and, in a sense, to know—Irving by reading Encounter. That began in Sydney in 1955, shortly after I had arrived in Australia. I was a bit slow off the mark because I’d spent the previous two years doing my national service in the rural depths of Somerset, and new intellectual magazines were hard to come by in RAF messes. Then I got a job at Sydney University (advertised in the back of another magazine, the leftist New Statesman and Nation, which had a circulation of around 90,000 at that time and was to be found in the mess).