The Affair

Author’s Note

This book is the third and last member of the Strangers and Brothers sequence which is set in a Cambridge college. I wrote in a preface to The Masters: “This fictional college stands upon an existing site, and its topography is similar to that of an existing college, though some of the details are different. That is the end, however, of my reference to a real institution.”

I should like to repeat that. So far as I know, there has been no actual deprivation of a Fellow in an Oxford or Cambridge college in circumstances anything like those I have described. Years ago, when I began thinking about the theme of justice, my starting-point was the Dreyfus affair (cf. page 152); hence the title of this book. For the scientific fraud, I have drawn on the picturesque case of Rupp.