SOURCE: "Harold Laski," in From Napoleon to Stalin and Other Essays, The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1980, pp. 170-76.

In the following essay, originally published in 1953, Carr profiles Laski's correspondence with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Judge of the American Supreme Court and the most distinguished American lawyer of recent times, commonly referred to as "Mr. Justice Holmes", to distinguish him from his father of the same name, the author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, had reached the age of 75 in the year 1916 when Mr Felix Frankfurter, head of the famous Law School of Harvard, brought to visit him at his summer residence in New England a remarkable young Englishman in his twenty-third year. Harold Laski was the son of Orthodox Jewish parents of Polish origin settled in Manchester. He had gone up to New College, Oxford, with a scholarship at the age of 18. As...