We listened to the excellent programme about Jacob Bronowski last night (I have put the link to it below) – interesting for the light it shone on a mid-century mathematician and intellectual who, it turned out, had had a file kept on him by MI5 for no obvious reason except that he had been reported by a local schoolmaster for being ‘extremely left’ when he was a lecturer in mathematics in Hull before the war and then for attending meetings of the Left Book Club. This didn’t prevent him being employed as a statistician by the Ministry of Home Security working on calculations about the bombing of German cities, nor from appearing as a member of the Brains Trust in the 1950s, but may have stopped him from making programmes about atomic energy. It’s very sad that Lisa Jardine was unable to complete the work on her father which she was writing at the time of her death in 2015, which would presumably have explored his intellectual history, but at least we were able to hear her voice, as well as that of Bronowski himself in an amazing clip from The Ascent of Man.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00223sw?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile