As much attracted by his undoubted brilliance as by the whiff of sulphur which surrounded his ideas

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. Page 41.

John Liamor gathered about him a salon of acolytes. These were students who were as much attracted by his undoubted brilliance as by the whiff of sulphur which surrounded his ideas. It was the seventies, and the frothiness of the previous decade had subsided. What remained to believe in, or indeed to mock? Ambition and personal gain, those heady gods of the following decade, were in the wings, but not centre stage, which made a brooding Irishman with an iconoclastic talent an intriguing option. With John Liamor it was not essential to believe in anything; all that was required was the ability to mock. And that was where his real appeal lay; he could sneer at the sneerers themselves because he was Irish and they, for all their radicalism, were still English and therefore, in his view, irretrievably part of the whole apparatus of oppression.

Isabel did not fit easily into this circle, and people remarked on the unlikely nature of the developing liaison. John Liamor’s detractors, in particular—and he was not popular in his college, nor in the philosophy department—found the relationship a strange one. These people resented Liamor’s intellectual condescension, and its trappings; he read French philosophy and peppered his remarks with references to Foucault. And, for one or two of them at least, those who really disliked him, there was something else: Liamor wasn’t English. “Our Irish friend and his Scottish friend,” one of the detractors remarked. “What an interesting, interesting couple. She’s thoughtful; she’s reasonable; she’s civil; he’s a jumped-up Brendan Behan. One expects him to break into song at any moment. You know the sort. I could have cried with pride at the way he died, and so on. Lots of anger about what we were meant to have done to them back years ago. That sort of thing.”