I’m reading the memoirs of Mary Warnock, whom I hope to profile. She’s the nearest thing to an acknowledged moral arbiter this country has: an Oxford philosopher who has been a member of every important committee for years and years. She wasn’s and wouldn’t claim to be in the first rank of Oxford philosophy; but when you wanted something done in the world, with due attention paid to the philosophical plumbing, Mary Warnock was the woman to do it, most notably in her report on embryo research and IVF. So it’s a bit of a shock to find this story in her memoirs:
The Littles’ children were much the same ages as our eldest two, and we often entrusted our pair to their nanny, while we went and played golf. (This, in retrospect, seems rash: the nanny had had a pre-frontal lobotomy, a fashionable cure for depression in those days, but known to dominish the patients’ moral sense)