A vignette of Oakeshott’s milieu

Shirley and William Letwin provided a social circle for Oakeshott (amongst many others) during his London days in the 1950s and ’60s.

Charles Moore recounts his own entry into this circle in At Home with the Letwins’ Salon (in the May 2013 issue of Standpoint Magazine). He recalls a place where gawky teenagers could rub shoulders with Nobel Laureates, where almost no topic was off-limits and the talk was the very embodiment of Oakeshott’s “conversation of mankind”:

Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another…