“My father was trained as a saddler, but in fact as a young man worked in his father’s business of rearing and selling cattle, so he grew up in the countryside.”

I did not feel a particularly strong call to any one subject, but read voraciously and widely and began to find science interesting.

Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.

People who get Nobel prizes aren’t necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work.

One cannot plan for the unexpected.

Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world.

I like teaching and the contact with young minds keeps one on one’s toes, but increasing responsibilities have forced me to shed much of it in recent years.

The philosophy of the school was quite simple – the bright boys specialised in Latin, the not so bright in science and the rest managed with geography or the like.