“This book would have gone to my friend Frank Haldinstein, scholar, of Christ Church and captain in the Royal Engineers. But his name has been added to the list on which the Oxford of my generation will write with undying pride.

When I look back on certain magic nights at Oxford and re-read these pages in the light of their memory, I realise how halting they are compared to the things they would have said. But I take it that for them the one justification of this conflict would have been the thought that we who are left are trying in some sort to understand the problems of the state they died to make free. To have known them was an education in liberty.”