There is an added curiosity in finding myself reading Tristram Hunt’s biography of Engels at the same time as we have the latest failed attempt by a young man to bring down a plane in the USA in the name of radical Islamism.
It is also startling to hear, in the year which marks the centenary of the assassination of Sir Curzon Wyllie, that the young man who has been arrested for this latest terrorist incident was a student of mechanical engineering at University College London, as was Wylie’s assassin.
I hasten to add that I do not mean in any way to imply that UCL encourages or fosters such acts.
The first university in England to admit students of any race, class or religion & the first to welcome women on equal terms with men, UCL has Jeremy Bentham (& his preserved skeleton) as its spiritual father & came above Oxford University in the latest world university rankings . Some of my best friends ….
Engels, Dhingra & Abdulmutallab come from very different eras but were all very bright young men from comfortable backgrounds who, from quite an early age, began to show signs of rebellion, particularly against their father's values (students of my generation would have been quick to diagnose an Oedipus complex) & became students of & passionate adherents to a cause & a route to a better world.
What we now call radicalised.
There were plenty around in the western world of the 1960s & it became fashionable to bemoan the lack of passion or political conviction in later generations of students.
