What finer way could there be to warm the cockles of the old House man’s heart than from that great vantage point to launch a new publication! My own effort, fifty years ago this year, was called Dialogue , launched with my friend and fellow PPE scholar at Christ Church, Alasdair Clayre. We had a sanguine view of the cold war, then – shortly after the Bulganin-Khrushchev visit to Oxford – only a decade into its forty years duration. Blinkered diplomats, pachydermic politicians, besotted ideologues stood, we thought, in the way of the natural and rational desire of the young generation to exchange ideas, to hammer out their differences – if any – and to be free to live together – coexist was the word – in friendly intercourse.We did not suppose that things were likely to change fundamentally in the Soviet Union or even in its satellites. The law of the Medes and the Persians seemed to have established a, as we would now say, bi-polar world with capitalism in the west a ...