Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

He translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English and during the war worked for the British Diplomatic Service. He was appointed a CBE in 1946 knighted in 1957 and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He excelled as an essayist conversationalist and raconteur; and as a brilliant lecturer who improvised rapidly and spontaneously richly allusive and coherently structured material.