[Q] What started your interest in science then?

Well, I think it probably started when I went to the main school at 12, which was St Paul's Boys' School, then in Hammersmith and then in the country when the war started and I don't exactly know why but I got grabbed by science very early. And I suppose the main time was the years between what was then called school cert and getting... and going to Cambridge. When I... I read hugely, absolutely totally indiscriminately; I think I read books about things which I didn't know anything about just to keep reading but the... one of the central things was science and I think I was really very influenced by my reading about science. There were a lot of... I suppose there were the earlier equivalents of people like Richard Dawkins and so on: James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, above all JBS Haldane and they made me feel how very interesting science was and I think that there were probably other ones. I think I read Inquiries into Human Faculty by Galton, a rather weird thing to read.

[Q] And what did that... I don't know that, what...

Well, it was really a first attempt at finding out how people's minds worked, I think. And another one was The Grammar of Science by Karl Pearson... even then would have been a much older figure. I mean, I can't now remember what they were all about actually but they influenced me a lot and especially Haldane and things like Lancelot Hogben Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen. They all... many of the authors had a very strong left wing agenda, which I didn't actually kind of register on or appreciate at those times but they thought very much of the social function of science and popularising it.