During my first summer term at Cambridge in 1955, the ‘Backs’—a vast stretch of grass on the far side of the River Cam—were converted into tennis courts, and I spent many an hour playing there with my fellow students. In the nondescript town of Gillingham, Kent, where I grew up, there had been a multitude of small tennis clubs, which was odd since it was neither prosperous nor culturally distinguished. Gillingham was boringly lower-middle class. My parents had met at a local tennis club sometime in the 1920s. At the end of our street, a garden had been converted into a lovingly maintained grass court and one of my earliest memories is sitting on a blanket there and watching my parents play tennis, in striking white flannel outfits. I must have been four years old, just before the War broke out.

Playing on the Backs, we were frequently watched by a sombre figure, dark and slender, usually dressed in a long black coat and a sort of peasant cap, and even in summer sporting a muffler around his throat. He had piercing eyes, and it was quite nerve-wracking having him stand behind you when you served. Many a double fault resulted from that intense gaze on my back. Worse, when winter came and I switched to playing squash, he would be there in the gallery, staring at us disconcertingly. The presence of this individual was a matter of much comment among my fellow students. Who was this mysterious figure?

In our third year, one of us solved the riddle. The man in black was an Italian economist called Piero Sraffa, who had a research fellowship at Trinity College. He had written an important article in 1926, on the strength of which Keynes had invited him to Cambridge to be a librarian at King’s College.footnote¹ As far as anyone could tell, he had written nothing of significance since then. He reputedly hated teaching, which was presumably why he still held a research fellowship. He had no position in the university’s Economics Department, but as a fellow of Trinity, with free board and lodging and access to the college’s wine cellar, he could live parsimoniously but well. The post-war cohort of students to which I belonged viewed with contempt the gentlemanly tolerance for eccentricity that allowed a supposedly leading educational institution to keep such unproductive parasites on the books. In the name of meritocracy, modernity and innovation, we were all for sweeping away those encrusted class privileges that defined the university and English society as a whole.

Some years later, I was back in Cambridge for an event. Wandering into one of the many superb bookshops that still existed at the time, I happened upon a book titled Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, by one Piero Sraffa.footnote² It was an exceedingly slim volume and I estimated that Sraffa’s productivity must have amounted to three pages a year since 1926. The book was stuffed with mathematical equations of considerable complexity that I would never be able to understand. Later, on an impulse, I bought a copy that I still have on my shelves.

In the early 1960s, I decided to teach myself some economics. In the summer months, I often found myself driving my Mini across Europe, usually en route to Sweden, with a copy of Samuelson’s introductory Economics in the boot. One summer I drove into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie, just after the Wall went up. On the way out, the guards impounded the Samuelson. (I have since fancifully imagined that the corrosive effects of its circulation through the ddr played a role in ending the Cold War.) Deprived of my Samuelson, I determined to read some Keynes and was surprised to discover The General Theory’s fulsome acknowledgement of Sraffa’s contribution. I also learned that Sraffa was then in the process of editing The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, which was surely no mean task. Sraffa was plainly not as unproductive as I had supposed. My puzzlement deepened when I discovered that Wittgenstein’s theory of language games was a result of a conversation with Sraffa on the train from Cambridge to London. Sraffa had apparently insisted that hand gestures were as much a form of linguistic communication as the spoken or written word. As Wittgenstein put it in his preface to the Philosophical Investigations:

I was helped to realize these mistakes—to a degree I myself am hardly able to estimate—by the criticism which my ideas encountered from Frank Ramsey, with whom I discussed them in innumerable conversations during the last years of his life. Even more than to this—always certain and forcible—criticism I am indebted to that which a teacher of this university, Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my thoughts. I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book.footnote³

With two intellectual giants of the mid-twentieth century expressing such appreciation for Piero, my opinion of him—and of Cambridge—had to be revised.