I wandered the rest of the party and noticed people staring at me. Had I become the dad in the basement at the teenage party? No, as it turned out, it was the analog act of taking notes with a pen on a notebook that was freaking people out. I may as well have been prancing around with an abacus.

BTW, I just finished Carr’s brilliant and terrifying “Night of the gun.” Adjectives don’t do it justice, so I’ll just say my heart pounded and ached throughout.

Hofi Geza, right, was Hungary’s comic genius 1950-90s. Around 30 seconds in this clip, Hofi reprises “Go marching in” as “Go Nanci Neni” (or “Go Aunt Nancy.”)

Macmillan was writing nostalgically in The Times in 1965 (two years after his resignation as PM) about his grand experiences at Oxford. The don in question was J. A. Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, who, according to Macmillan, opened his course in 1914 with the passage I cited, which ended: “. . . if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.”