Bentham in the Twentieth Century

May I begin by saying with what a sense of honour and pleasure I received your invitation to speak at this assembly. It is just forty-nine years since my father, anxious to give me the taste of a university education before being engulfed in the First World War, brought me to be interviewed — and admitted, age sixteen — by Gregory Foster, then Provost of this college; and although my stay here was a very short one, I never walk into this building without a feeling of nostalgia for the lectures where I first heard the great scholars of those days discoursing on the problems of history and literature at a grown-up level.