My own first meeting with Irving was in 1968, when I spent part of a sabbatical in America. My initial impression, strengthened rather than changed over the years, was of how comfortably high intelligence and good nature—two qualities that are not habitually found together (or even separately) in intellectuals—were combined in him. The intelligence was evident in the way the conversation seemed to be happening in a higher gear than I was accustomed to: the sharpness of the wit, the speed in anticipating one’s point, the shorthand in stating his own. (The latter was easy to mistake initially for off-the-cuff dogmatism, until one probed and found that the arguments were all in place and that it was just a case of dispensing with the recitative. When, say, Irving pronounced flatly that NATO should be abolished, it was after he had thought hard and carefully worked out his position.)