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Were British newspapers in 1935 and '36 much different than they are today?

I think that they are really surprisingly the same. The relative merits and demerits of British newspapers I think you will find to be quite similar in that period and today. There are fewer of them today, naturally. There are fewer American papers. But I don't believe there has been any really major change in the status or in the approach of British newspapers. The Times and Telegraph and Guardian are still the papers you would mention as the good papers, the best papers in Britain. The penny press diminishing as it is, it is still very much the same type of press that it was in those days, the Express and the Mail just as bad as ever. I doubt that they're any worse, probably a little better. But it has always been my contention that the worst of the British papers are worse than the worst of the American papers, although I think that the best of the British and Continental papers are pretty good.

Were you involved in any journalistic activities at all at Oxford?

Not at Oxford at all, no. I did not do anything of that sort at Oxford. There was really very little opportunity for an American to do any. Of course, there was nothing like the college newspapers that we have. There was a magazine called the Isis but it was more literary and less journalistic. In any case, I think it would have been very difficult for an American in only two years to have been a member of that, and I had no inclination and didn't make the slightest effort to. I was much more interested really in kind of immersing myself in the life at Oxford than to go into any specific extracurricular activities as I would normally do and did at an American university. The only kind of journalistic activity of any