Freddie amok

Christ Church was by far the grandest, most aristocratic and church-minded of all the Oxford colleges, with an even higher than usual proportion of homosexual dons. Ayer was half Jewish, a militant atheist and flamboyantly heterosexual.

...Ayer's enthusiasm for an obscure foreigner [Wittgenstein] operating out of the rival outfit at Cambridge did him no good. In his final examinations he was marked down for a second by the philosophy department, scraping a first-class degree only on the strength of his ancient history papers. From then on Oxford repeatedly snubbed him. He was turned down for the John Locke philosophy prize, passed over for a college job and rejected as a fellow by All Souls. ''Oxford is afraid of him,'' Ayer's friend and contemporary Isaiah Berlin said.


In the end, Christ Church reluctantly granted him a humble academic post initially created for Albert Einstein. Ayer published his first book, ''Language, Truth and Logic,'' in 1936. It brought him a success out of all proportion to its sales of just over 1,000 copies (64 years later, the book still sells 2,000 a year in Britain: a 1945 reprint in the United States has sold 300,000). It was one of those books that galvanize a whole generation. Ambitious undergraduates commonly read it at a sitting. Their elders were appalled. When students tried to discuss the book at an Oxford seminar, the Master of Balliol flung it through the window. Ayer was denounced by a housemaster at Winchester School as the wickedest man in Oxford. 

"What do you mean by 'wicked'...exactly?"

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