conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about with the genre: History, Europe?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Memory Chalet'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Memory Chalet
  My greatest debt, though I did not fully appreciate it at the time, was to Dunn, then a very young college Research Fellow, now a distinguished professor emeritus. It was John who—in the course of one extended conversation on the political thought of John Locke—broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect.
  That is teaching. It is also a certain sort of liberalism: the kind that engages in good faith with dissenting (or simply mistaken) opinions across a broad political spectrum. No doubt such tolerant intellectual breadth was not confined to King's. But listening to friends and contemporaries describe their experiences elsewhere, I sometimes wonder. Lecturers in other establishments often sounded disengaged and busy, or else professionally self-absorbed in the manner of American academic departments at their least impressive. As in so many other respects, I think our generation was fortunate: we got the best of both worlds. Promoted on merit into a class and culture that were on their way out, we experienced Oxbridge just before the fall—for which I confess that my own generation, since risen to power and office, is largely responsible.
  The result, predicted from the outset, was that the selective private schools ("public schools") have flourished. Desperate parents pay substantial fees to exempt their children from dysfunctional state schools; universities are under inordinate pressure to admit underqualified candidates from the latter and have lowered their admissions standards accordingly; each new government has instituted reforms aimed at compensating for the failed "initiatives" of their predecessors.
  Today, when the British government mandates that 50 percent of high school graduates should attend university, the gap separating the quality of education received by the privately schooled minority from that of everyone else is greater than at any time since the 1940s. They consistently outperform their state-educated peers—a dirty little secret that no one cares to acknowledge but that panicked New Labour governments. It does seem curious to curse the private schools for thriving in a market while enthusiastically rewarding bankers for doing so.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about King's, used.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Memory Chalet
  My greatest debt, though I did not fully appreciate it at the time, was to Dunn, then a very young college Research Fellow, now a distinguished professor emeritus. It was John who—in the course of one extended conversation on the political thought of John Locke—broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect. 
  That is teaching. It is also a certain sort of liberalism: the kind that engages in good faith with dissenting (or simply mistaken) opinions across a broad political spectrum. No doubt such tolerant intellectual breadth was not confined to King's. But listening to friends and contemporaries describe their experiences elsewhere, I sometimes wonder. Lecturers in other establishments often sounded disengaged and busy, or else professionally self-absorbed in the manner of American academic departments at their least impressive. 
  There is more of that in King's today than there used to be. As in so many other respects, I think our generation was fortunate: we got the best of both worlds. Promoted on merit into a class and culture that were on their way out, we experienced Oxbridge just before the fall—for which I confess that my own generation, since risen to power and office, is largely responsible. 
  The result, predicted from the outset, was that the selective private schools ("public schools") have flourished. Desperate parents pay substantial fees to exempt their children from dysfunctional state schools; universities are under inordinate pressure to admit underqualified candidates from the latter and have lowered their admissions standards accordingly; each new government has instituted reforms aimed at compensating for the failed "initiatives" of their predecessors. 
  Today, when the British government mandates that 50 percent of high school graduates should attend university, the gap separating the quality of education received by the privately schooled minority from that of everyone else is greater than at any time since the 1940s. They consistently outperform their state-educated peers—a dirty little secret that no one cares to acknowledge but that panicked New Labour governments. It does seem curious to curse the private schools for thriving in a market while enthusiastically rewarding bankers for doing so.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: four more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the "Washington consensus" in vulnerable developing countries—with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation—has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent "commercial terms" on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher's deathless phrase, "there is no alternative."
  For Miłosz, "the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are." This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the East European in the face of Western innocence. But there is nothing innocent about Western (and Eastern) commentators' voluntary servitude before the new pan-orthodoxy. Many of them, Ketman-like, know better but prefer not to raise their heads above the parapet. In this sense at least, they have something truly in common with the intellectuals of the Communist age. One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Miłosz's indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: "his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself."
  Even if you got a date, it was like courting your grandmother. Girls in those days came buttressed in an impenetrable Maginot Line of hooks, belts, girdles, nylons, roll-ons, suspenders, slips, and petticoats. Older boys assured me that these were mere erotic impedimenta, easily circumnavigated. I found them terrifying. And I was not alone, as any number of films and novels from that era can illustrate. Back then we all lived on Chesil Beach.
  In 1981, shortly after arriving at Oxford, I invited a student and her boyfriend to dinner. My wife and I lived in a country village and by the time the young couple arrived it was snowing hard. They would have to stay overnight. I casually pointed out the tiny guestroom with its double bed and wished them good night. Only much later did it occur to me to wonder whether the pair were sleeping together. When I delicately alluded to the matter a few days later, the young woman patted me on the shoulder: "Don't worry Tony, we understood. You '60s types!"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last four paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Swiss, curiously, are never troubled by what British Rail used to call "the wrong kind of leaves"—or, indeed, the wrong kind of snow. Just as the little mountain men ascend the daunting Klein Matterhorn with an untroubled air, so the trains that their great-grandfathers built have for decades trundled effortlessly up and down from Brig to Zermatt, from Chur to St. Moritz, from Bex to Villars.
  My happiest memories are of Mürren. We first went there when I was eight years old: an unspoiled village halfway up the Schilthorn massif attainable only by rack railway or cable car. It takes forever—and a minimum of four trains—to reach the place, and there is little to do once you arrive. There is no particularly good food and the shopping is unexciting, to say the least.
  I have never thought of myself as a rooted person. We are born by chance in one town rather than another and pass through various temporary homes in the course of our vagrant lives—at least that is how it has been for me. Most places hold mixed memories: I cannot think of Cambridge or Paris or Oxford or New York without recalling a kaleidoscope of encounters and experiences. How I remember them varies with my mood. But Mürren never changes. Nothing ever went wrong there.
  There is a path of sorts that accompanies Mürren's pocket railway. Halfway along, a little café—the only stop on the line—serves the usual run of Swiss wayside fare. Ahead, the mountain falls steeply away into the rift valley below. Behind, you can clamber up to the summer barns with the cows and goats and shepherds. Or you can just wait for the next train: punctual, predictable, and precise to the second. Nothing happens: it is the happiest place in the world. We cannot choose where we start out in life, but we may finish where we will. I know where I shall be: going nowhere in particular on that little train, forever and ever.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I know where I shall be: going nowhere in particular on that little train, forever and ever.. We cannot choose where we start out in life, but we may finish where we will. Nothing happens: it is the happiest place in the world. Or you can just wait for the next train: punctual, predictable, and precise to the second. Behind, you can clamber up to the summer barns with the cows and goats and shepherds. Ahead, the mountain falls steeply away into the rift valley below. Halfway along, a little café—the only stop on the line—serves the usual run of Swiss wayside fare.
  There is a path of sorts that accompanies Mürren's pocket railway. Nothing ever went wrong there. But Mürren never changes. How I remember them varies with my mood. Most places hold mixed memories: I cannot think of Cambridge or Paris or Oxford or New York without recalling a kaleidoscope of encounters and experiences. We are born by chance in one town rather than another and pass through various temporary homes in the course of our vagrant lives—at least that is how it has been for me.
  I have never thought of myself as a rooted person. There is no particularly good food and the shopping is unexciting, to say the least. It takes forever—and a minimum of four trains—to reach the place, and there is little to do once you arrive. We first went there when I was eight years old: an unspoiled village halfway up the Schilthorn massif attainable only by rack railway or cable car.
  My happiest memories are of Mürren. Moritz, from Bex to Villars. Just as the little mountain men ascend the daunting Klein Matterhorn with an untroubled air, so the trains that their great-grandfathers built have for decades trundled effortlessly up and down from Brig to Zermatt, from Chur to St.The Swiss, curiously, are never troubled by what British Rail used to call "the wrong kind of leaves"—or, indeed, the wrong kind of snow