Fulbright and I

William Fulbright began the visiting programme that bears his name in 1946, by tacking it on to an aid bill before the US Congress. Part of the lore surrounding the upstart from Little Rock, Arkansas, says that he put his idea forward on the spur of the moment, not so much the Fulbright Amendment as the Fulbright afterthought.

Having changed the lives of thousands of people with his bright plan for study trips he changed mine, too, 27 years later, in 1974, when I became a kind of Fulbright afterthought squared. A hirsute thing in his 20s, I had been…