My first memory of Raphael is at a history meeting in St Hilda’s, Oxford in the early 60s. I think it may have been the Stubbs Society, anyway it was august and formal and donnish and he was a dark, thin, extraordinary figure with a flop of hair which persistently fell over his eyes. His subject was the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s—a topic about which I knew nothing at all, for it had been side-stepped by my school ‘A’ levels and the Oxford history curriculum. Both conspired to eschew subjects they deemed emotive.

Raphael’s account of the human suffering of the Irish and the dogma of laissez-faire in London was consequently revelatory. It was also quite overwhelming. Raphael was in what I would later come to recognize as overkill. I can still see the great piles of paper on the desk before him. We watched like the crowd at Wimbledon, as one side on our right went down and the other on our left went up. He was intensely concentrated, no doubt because he knew he was surrounded by dons with a sharp nose for sniffing out Marxism, which was far from fashionable in 1963. The evidence against the British ruling class might be piling up on the left, as they and their grotesque economic doctrines of the sanctity of the free market were being nailed, but he had some wily opponents there.

However, in 1963 no one was going to jump in and defend the iron laws of political economy. Laissez-faire was clearly a delusion. Or so it seemed. In retrospect, Raphael’s account has assumed a sombre contemporary meaning. But how could we have imagined that laissez-faire could make its come-back to claim more human sacrifices? Keynes seemed irrevocable then. Impossible to imagine Thatcherism in the early sixties. I thought I had left the assumptions and values of the Leeds small business world I had been brought up in where only money really counted behind me when I went to Oxford, with its learned people and Gothic grandeur. I assumed Capital Volume I was a historical document, for it seemed self-evident that twentieth-century welfare capitalism was a new phase entirely. Time has its way of twisting the obvious right round. But, at nineteen, your sense of lived time is too short for such ponderings.

Raphael spoke for a very long time indeed that night. He told a tragic story and made a devastating onslaught on ideology buttressing privilege. Yet he did it with considerable complexity and subtlety. Always quick on his feet intellectually, he did an intricate dance that night and presented us with genuine belief and opportunism so intertwined they were hard to prise apart. I glimpsed how difficult it is to untangle conviction and self-interest. I think he was communicating something else too—which I found a word to express a few years later when I read Gramsci—the power of the hegemonic hold of values and assumptions.

The papers were shifting faster and faster as the minutes ticked by. I suspect he had to scuttle over some damning evidence. Yet, of course, there was more than enough—a pattern I was to come to recognize. Publishers waited for his books to be done, journal editors found they had a series when they commissioned an article, and I don’t recall Raphael ever giving a short talk. Was it, I wonder, a dislike for the boundaries of time which had led him towards the past? This was not one of those occasions, however, when you watch the transfer of paper hopefully, craning to see how much writing is left on the untouched pages. It was an event, an occasion. It was riveting and memorable.

My attention was captured despite an anxious personal predicament which meant I sat uneasily on my seat. Amidst Raphael’s account of the hegemonic impact of laissez-faire, I was wondering whether by any chance the St Hilda’s dons might be familiar with the aroma of Suleo which wafted around my thighs. During the winter holidays my boyfriend (who had an advanced and impressive knowledge of Simone de Beauvoir, Kinsey and diaphragms) and I had gone to stay with a friend at Bristol university. We were discovered by her outraged landlord, who threatened to turn us out in the snow—this was before the more amiable mores of permissive sexuality. Fortunately the man relented, but unfortunately the sleeping bag he gave us downstairs was lousy.

I had returned to St Hilda’s with the creatures and had gone in trepidation to the doctor. He was jocular and amused. ‘You don’t look the type to go with gis’ he declared. It was a statement that puzzled me. What did that type look like and why did lice—or, more specifically, crabs—emanate from Americans? He prescribed Suleo, ddt and boiling my underwear. None of these were easy in the St Hilda’s hostel. The ddt was spotted and I was summoned to explain. ‘I thought I saw a moth’. Nature was never my strong point. ‘It’s not the season for moths’, boomed the don in charge. In terror, I stuck to my mythical moth. There was no way you could tell a female don in Oxford in 1963 about sex and lice.