Prelude to an Intellectual Odyssey

Abstract

My earliest memories of a world in turmoil are of three high-profile developments in then distant lands in the mid- to late 1930s. I awakened to a cruel and violent world at the time of the Spanish Civil War. I first became aware of great power politics during the Munich Crisis and the debate over appeasement. And I was 14 when much of the world descended once more into the abyss of war.