Sir Michael Atiyah, a mathematician, was a Delegate of the Press in 1985. He later became President of The Royal Society and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (in which post he was succeeded by Amartya Sen).
Malcolm: I'm phoning you in your ex-capacity as a Delegate of OUP. I believe you were a Delegate in 1985 or thereabouts, which is the time I'm interested in. My first simple question: have you by any chance kept the various papers you must have amassed at that time in your capacity as a Delegate or have they all been thrown away by now?
Atiyah: I should think I've kept them, at least in recent times. I mean I was a Delegate for ten years; whether I've kept them all the way back I'm not sure.
Malcolm: Oh really? I imagine you may regard them as confidential, but what I'm particularly interested in is I submitted a philosophical text to the Press entitled Making Names, I don't know if that rings a bell with you at all?
Atiyah: When was this?
Malcolm: I submitted it in late 1984 and I think it came before the Delegates in 1985. It originally went to Alan Ryan who was a Delegate then; being a philosophical text, he became the referee.
Atiyah: Yes. I may vaguely remember. But you know we had so many texts that I can't possibly...
Malcolm: Sure. It was going to be a General Book rather than an academic text. It came under the auspeces of the General Books Department, it is a somewhat polemical text written for the lay-reader... Anyway, this is where if you do still have the papers from that time you may be able to help. I believe that it came to a Delegates' meeting late in July 1985.
Atiyah: Yes.
Malcolm: Now, you may feel that this is something confidential which you don't wish to answer, but it would be interesting for me to know whether you do still have the documents that would or would not confirm whether that is the case.
Atiyah: Well, I may well have the documents, but certainly the documents are not confidential.
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Atiyah: I think all I can say is the following. If you would like to write me a letter and put down some of these facts on paper, if you would like me to check any facts against my records, I will be happy to check the facts against my records and notify you accordingly. If you say you believe it was approved on such-and-such a date or wasn't, I can certainly check that and I think that's a matter of record I can certainly confirm.
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Atiyah: Of course the minutes or records that are kept are usually very brief, they just record books which have been approved or otherwise, without going into all the ins and outs of the cases for them at the meeting, so they're not usually full reports in detail, but they will certainly factually say a list of books approved or such-and-such. That does go down in a list and those are certainly matters of fact I think at that stage. So I can certainly, if you put the dates and things, I can try and chase them up and then I can come back to you and let you have what information I have, although I'd probably have to consult the Press in some sense before I could divulge it, but I certainly can look at my records and check the facts against you and I think you're entitled to have them, facts of that kind,
Malcolm: Right.
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