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Oakeshott as a Professor at the LSE

Oakeshott lecturing at the LSE, 1964,
courtesy BLPES Oakeshott Archives

The memory of [Oakeshott's] elegant, graceful lectures is unforgettable. (He would slip onto the stage of the large lecture room at LSE through an opening in the curtains, usually dressed in a deep green or deep red velvet jacket and small gold reading-glasses perched on his nose, and hold an audience of hundreds enthralled with topics that might, in lesser hands, induce drowsiness – such as the distinction between auctoritas and potestas in Roman thought. But in a graduate seminar his manner was radically different: he would look meditatively at the table while others held forth, murmuring an encouraging yes, yes to keep the conversation afloat. And in that he invariably succeeded; his greatest gifts were for conversation and friendship, both sustained by knowledge and by a boyish enthusiasm which he radiated even in his ninetieth year.)

– Patrick Riley, Michael Oakeshott, Political Philosopher, in Cambridge Review, October 1991, p. 113; also published as In Appreciation: Michael Oakeshott, Philosopher of Individuality, in Review of Politics Vol. 54, No. 4 (Fall, 1992) p. 662.