Although my own views at the time were leftish (I had, after all, grown up in a South Wales mining valley), I found all this depressing. It was, for one thing, a coarse-grained radicalism, unadorned by any of the (in retrospect, perhaps spurious) sophistication and glamour that the Bevans and the Crossmans brought to the British version. For another, it was much more uncritically pro-Soviet than I was used to—for, Kingsley Martin notwithstanding, the British Left as a whole was not fellow travelling. But there was another reason: once in Sydney, I began that important process of self-education that is involved in preparing lectures, in my case lectures on international affairs and on totalitarianism. Once engaged in a close study of these matters (something that I had managed to avoid at Oxford) and having to declare myself in public on them, I quickly came to doubt and to move away from the prevailing leftist interpretations.