Rot wiles

A friend sent my father the source for one of his famous quotations.

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.”