[Q] When you were at Cambridge, were you… I mean apart from being a humourist and a cartoonist, I mean were you ever any kind of an -ist, I mean like an existentialist?  Did you think of yourself as…

No, I had absolutely no -isms at all. I suppose I was a… I was Secretary of the Humanist Society, without very much enthusiasm for it.  It didn’t seem to me… I was just invited to do it.  But it was a rather nice form of social life, that’s all. I wasn’t there, as it were, as an ardent upholder of [unclear] belief. I don’t think I was an exponent of any particular ‘-ism’.

I suppose I was what you would call left in inclination. I was a creature of the Labour landslide of ‘45 and felt that they’d introduced more fairness.  But I was certainly not a communist.  Not that I'd objected to it, and I didn’t really know an enormous amount about it, and of course I was really pretty well unacquainted with the appalling and atrocious tyrannies that had been implemented in its name. It wasn’t until the mid-50s that we really… the outsiders like myself became acquainted with what was done in the name of this millennial theory of social improvement.