 Professor Smith, you are the 10th Good Heart Professor, we have the pleasure of interviewing and we are very grateful to you for agreeing to add to our archive. You have an illustrious and varied career in which you've held academic positions at five universities and professorships at three of those. I hope that we can talk today about your early life and your career, touching on your aspirations for your time in the Good Heart Chair and then at a later stage you'll be a chance to talk about your scholarly work and again hopefully you can talk about your research as a Good Heart incumbent. So could we start with when you were born, just shortly after the war? Yes. In 1947. That's right, two years after the war, born in Christchurch in New Zealand in 1947 in January. My father was in the Air Force. He stayed in the Air Force after the war. He'd been a navigator in the Solomon's and Guadalcanal during the war. But he decided he would stay in the Air Force. And that meant that our early life, I had an older sister and a younger brother and sister, meant that it was a very disruptive life. When I came to England, I think the year after I was born, my father was doing a specialist navigators course. The services were such that we moved every two or three years, so this early schooling was very, very disruptive. I think I went to about five different primary schools while I was in New Zealand. Professor Smith, your early life was somewhat disruptive because you moved several times. Yes. You went to primary school in Christchurch. No, I started in Wellington. In Wellington. Then went to Christchurch. And then to Christchurch. And back to Wellington. Back to Wellington. Yes. And you started your high school. You did your high school at St Beads. Yes, but I also had a year in Wellington. Well, we moved to a place called Blenheim. And between after Wellington, after Christchurch, I went to Blenheim. And I made the mistake of winning a scholarship to a boarding school in Wellington. And I did not like it one little bit. Fortunately, after a year of that, my father decided he'd had enough of the Air Force. He changed his job and we then went to Christchurch. Right. At that point, I had to go to a new secondary school. Which was St Beads? That was St Beads, yes. Is that a Catholic school? Well, it's both Catholic. All Catholic schools, yes. The early ones taught by nuns. The later ones by marital priests. Right. And at that early stage, were there any subjects at school that you excelled in? I was most interested, I suppose, in literature. I was very bad at that. And I think I was very badly taught at Silverstream. And then when I went to St Beads, I had a different teacher and made the subject completely different. I actually enjoyed chemistry. But I didn't enjoy the chemistry teacher at St Beads. And he once told me I was a complete waste of time. I was so cross, I worked hard at it. I got the top mark in chemistry and the national exam. He never spoke to me ever again. And mathematics I quite enjoyed. But again, the teacher, I asked him why we were differentiating functions. Because I couldn't quite see the point of it. And he said, never mind, just do it. And that doesn't have to put you off the subject, I think. That's right. But some of the teachers I had, particularly in English, I had a particularly good English teacher, a man called Father Weir, John Weir, who was a poet who had written quite a bit of his own poetry, that was an expert on the poetry of James K. Baxter. I had lost contact with him for quite a while, but met him again quite recently when he published the complete prose works of James K. Baxter, a four-volume work. He's now in his 80s. It was a wonderful piece of work, quite an amazing piece of scholarship. I'm pleased to have kept in touch with him. Wonderful to have met him again. Made in touch with him again, yes. Must have been very meaningful. It is, yes. He tells me he's writing a biography of Lewis Carroll, and I told him I thought that field was really rather full, but he was not daunted.