Second Part

0:09:07 Enjoy Gilbert and Sullivan; I don't think that I realized how witty Gilbert was when I was thirteen; I don't know how important the College system is as I have never been in another university context but Cambridge; having been given money to go to Germany before the War I thought I should go so I did a term at Göttigen and another at Tübingen; later on I did a term at A.N.U. in Canberra; I did have several friends in other disciplines including Edward Ford, an anatomist, David Harrison, a chemical engineer and later a Master of Selwyn, Robin Jackson, an engineer, they were all wise heads; the Germans say how mad you are to put people from different disciplines into one college, and why not have a college which is full of historians, for example; I am not prepared to say that is an impossibility, I just prefer what I am used to; I did find running a college difficult at first because I was the youngest of the Fellows when I arrived; they were very humane and tolerant; I was much more bored with committees of the History Faculty than committees of the College; have just written a thing about Charlotte Corday which partly merged into the whole theory of tyrannicide, so I am starting to compare the executions of Charles I or Louis XVI with Stauffenberg in 1944 and other famous tyrannicides; that is morality, the times when it would be better to murder someone than not; the Catholic Church has laid down occasions in its Canons; I think the whole business of Hitler and the Nazis made all that stuff obsolete; I think circumstances could arise where it is worth discussing; you normally accept that the only time it is right to kill a ruler is if the magistrates decide, hence some people would justify the execution of Charles I or Louis XVI, although the magistrates in both cases were dubious; one of the rules is that it must be certain that the situation after the murder is better than before; the Czechs murdered Heydrich with English help and if anybody ever deserved being murdered it was he, but the result was the killing of lots of Czechs, so the question is was the situation worse or better; if Mussolini hadn't been murdered by guerrillas and we put him on trial, he would have had a marvellous propagandist time, rather like Miloševic; so from the point of view of the situation being generally better, it was perhaps better that he was murdered by someone

11:45:03 Wrote a book on Acton whom I admired very much; of course I had his library in the University Library, a great library if you are a Church historian as it was Acton's love, although he never published more than a few articles on it; he bought steadily in the nineteenth century when revolutions caused, for example, Spain, Portugal and sometimes Italy, to sell their monastic books as monasteries everywhere were suppressed; the fact that he was concerned with liberty also mattered to me; the doubt is whether the morality sometimes took over from the history or was allowed to be too prominent; Acton's index slips in the University Library are of no use as they are hardly organised; I have known other people in my life who were immensely learned but never produced anything as they were so much in love with diminishing their ignorance;  in my own work, think I am a positivist, I don't like too much theory so I don't like Toynbee at all; that is not because he was a particular age in history, but the whole notion behind it seems to me fallacious; I admit that I, like everybody else, have prejudices but I don't know what they are so I don't worry about them; on the prediction of history, Butterfield tried to prove that politicians who didn't know history were worse politicians than those who did; I suspect that the Balkans might be better off at the moment if one or two people like David Owen or Lord Ashdown had known some history; I do think that understanding anything needs a little history, no fact is isolated and there are explanations, and no doubt some of them are wrong; there are patterns,  obviously, in a thing like democracy or dictatorship; I think that if an historian thinks he is dealing in individual facts he is not doing history

20:44:17 I loved history before I became a Christian so I think I would still have wanted to know a lot of history if I had become a lawyer as my father wanted; while at Selwyn became Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University for two years; naturally I think religion is very important in Cambridge; I believe that the chapel institution is wonderfully flourishing; interesting being Vice-Chancellor from 1969-1971; time of the Vietnam War protests; I used to analyse the protestors and they were usually a combination of American research students at the top and girls who were fresh at New Hall at the bottom; the call-up and flight of American students made them very revolutionary; people like our Home Secretary, Mr Maudling, whom I disapproved of, had an idea that the Cambridge protestors were shortly going to march on Whitehall; Robert McCrum, an undergraduate at Corpus, led a sit-in at the Economics building which is at the bottom of the garden at Selwyn; after about two hours he was fed-up so he walked across our lawn, said he was bored, and could he have a cup of tea; time also of the Garden House protest against the Greek colonels; it was complicated to deal with, more so because the judge was a fool and made remarks in Cambridge like "the evil influence of the Cambridge Dons"; I had to get up in public and defend them; after this became Regius Professor of History; the other contenders were Geoffrey Elton and Jack Plumb and those who liked one disliked the other; told by the University that I would be doing good if I moved from Dixie to Regius, so I did and enjoyed myself; although Geoffrey is in the generation where successors regard him as wrong about the main theories, but he was a powerful researcher into archives; Jack never finished his life of Walpole, which would never have happened with Geoffrey; nevertheless they were both good to have around; I was an undergraduate with Peter Laslett and when I was a member of the St John's College History Society, Peter was the secretary; the most brilliant paper we had during our time in that society was by Noel Annan from King's, on Admiral Byng; afterwards asked him how he knew so much about Byng and he replied that somebody had published a book on him the day before; liked Peter, though he was more eccentric than I was; I got on very well with Trevor-Roper when he came from Oxford