"When I was a teenager I was already passionately interested in the history of ideas, and I found for myself two writers who exercised a very strong influence upon my intellectual development, although neither of them was part of any syllabus. One was Bertrand Russell, whose History of Western Philosophy I read and re-read at school until I knew quite a lot of it by heart. This book introduced me to a world of thought I had never known about before, and I can still recall the excitement with which I read the early chapters on ancient philosophy. But another reason why I admired the book so much was that it seemed to me -- and it still seems to me -- a marvel of English prose. Russell won the Nobel Prize, and he won it for literature, and surely quite rightly. One could never hope to come anywhere near to emulating his style, but for me it has always remained a model of academic prose. The other philosopher I want to mention is R. G. Collingwood, who was chiefly interested in questions about interpretation and historical explanation. I first read him at school too, and although I’m not sure that I understood at the time what he was arguing, he subsequently exercised a very direct influence on my own approach to studying the history of ideas."