We ran up huge debt that rose to the astronomic level of £10,000 (roughly $13,000), the equivalent of £50,000 ($70,000) today. It was only paid off when I was forty-eight, by which time it had reached £650,000 ($900,000). I like to think that prodigious borrowing is putting money to good use.

obstreperous

For me, though, risk has long been an antidote to inertia. I felt that then. As an artist, Deirdre appreciated what a “project” or idea was about.

Dad died the following year, in 1956, when he was only forty. He had been thirty when he came back from Burma. Three years later he was diagnosed with cancer.

“What fool will sell us his secrets?” Stalin asked. The Nene was quickly reverse-engineered by Vladimir Yakovlevich Klimov into the VK-5A for what became the highly effective swept-wing Mig-15 fighter U.S. pilots came up against in the Korean War. Today, we need a great degree of secrecy and security to protect our research and inventions. It seems

Tony taught us that structure was architecture. Most enduringly good modern buildings of the past fifty years, like the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Lloyd’s building in London, as well as medieval cathedrals and ancient designs like the Pantheon in Rome, are defined by the structure that holds them up rather than by cladding or style.

A design might be considered ahead of its time and, sometimes because of this, even ridiculous. The hugely successful Sony Walkman was dismissed when first launched because who could possibly want a tape recorder that couldn’t record? And it was received knowledge until Volkswagen and, later, Honda crossed the Atlantic with the Beetle and the Accor

He encouraged us to believe that innate talent, when backed by natural enthusiasm, will shine through if only the right doors are opened. This is something I’ve never forgotten.

Before the Mini in 1959, there had been cars with transverse engines, notably the Saab 92 in 1947, a wind-cheating, rally-winning saloon engineered by a small team led by Gunnar Ljungström, an aero-engineer and keen sailor, and stylist Sixten Sason, a former Swedish Air Force pilot and designer of Saab military aircraft. In fact, the transverse car