When, in 1991, I was asked to chair the Royal Commission established in the immediate aftermath of the quashing of the convictions of the Birmingham Six, I was just as surprised as were the media, who on the day it was announced were reduced to projecting my passport photograph on the TV screen for the news programme which, as it happened, I watched in my room in a lodging house in Belfast, where I had just given a long-arranged lecture at the Queen's University on a totally different sociological topic.

LRB 10 November 1994 | PDF Download