¹ This is an unchanging imperative. Writing of the later years of his own directorship, Dahrendorf notes. ‘Here was the great School of Economics, the envy of the world, and all we could think about was how to squeeze money out of its students and friends and turn a centre for advanced study into an efficient supplier of probably fictitious markets’ (p. 501).

² In fairness we should quote the rest of the judgment: ‘But Laski instilled the excitement of a school of (economics and) political science, its forever unresolved tension with the outside world, into the minds and hearts of more than one generation of students. He defined, as it were, the inimitable LSE experience.’