None of this made the slightest sense to me. I took the slip of paper with the policy number on it, and looked amongst those that I had not yet removed from number order. It wasn’t there.
 “Do you know the date?”
 “Unfortunately, it was changed in 1959. No.”
 “I’ll find it.”
    What that meant was that I would have to thumb through every form in the room until I came across the one for Hamilton. I set to the task right away.

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evil-doer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had given them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted the darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened up the roads of the world…
…I came here to say that I do not recognise anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their numbers or how great their need.
“I wish to come here and say that I am not a man who exists for others.
“It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
“I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavour. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who are destroying the world.
“I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.
“I recognise no obligations towards men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. To my country, I wish to give the ten years which I will spend in jail if my country exists no longer. I will spend them in memory and in gratitude for what my country has been. It will be my act of loyalty, my refusal to live or work in what has taken its place….
  Perhaps the most errant genius in American literature was Ayn Rand, who seemed to combine dazzling intellect with gross naivety. However, only the cleverness was on display in The Fountainhead. If mediocrities revise the work of an artist, does that give the artist the right to destroy the work? Yes, according to Rand, even if the artist is an architect and the work a huge building. The battle of wits and wills to try and bring the artist-perfectionist into line with the mediocrities is always intriguing and satisfying. They made a film of it, a weird posturing thing, deeply thoughtful, amazingly erotic, grossly overstated, full of symbolism but oddly downplaying the Neitzschian idealism at it’s core. The scene with a muscular Gary Cooper clutching his pneumatic drill in a profoundly phallic manner as he gazes on the shapely form of Patricia Neal is unforgettable. One of the great oddities of American cinema.

The story of a man who said he would stop the engine of the world—and did!
So shrieked the cover of the big fat paperback, and I read it determinedly. After 700 pages as a serious drama, it suddenly transformed into science fiction. In which form it carried on for another 468 pages—the longest book I had yet read—longer even than the Bible.
  After the success of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand embarked upon the more ambitious work Atlas Shrugged and fell flat on her arse. There is a brilliant first half in which, amongst other things, the essential problem of Western commerce is explained. The man who knows all about railroads builds an empire based on railroads. He sends his son to Harvard where he learns Law or Accounting. Son inherits his fathers company and runs it – but he knows nothing about railroads. That’s why everything is going wrong. This is a book elitist in the extreme, and it is not helped by Rand’s smug writing style.
  All over the world, scientists and men of achievement are mysteriously disappearing. The female boss of a major railroad corporation is at the story’s centre, pondering why her best people are deserting her, why nothing works properly anymore and who is the mysterious John Galt? Galt proves to be a scientist who speaks for all scientists, and has persuaded them to withdraw their labour and join him in a utopia hidden high in the mountains. Soon, everything out there in the real world begins to wind down, and there is no progress and no one knows how to fix anything. Then the corporate kings must meet Galt’s demands. One of the best ideas in any book ever, but Rand meanders helplessly in the midst of her grand concept. The whole notion gets right out of hand by the end, not to mention completely unbelievable.
  Perhaps, then, it isn’t as surprising as it should be that it stated the position of, and gave rise to, the only major philosophical movement to come out of America (so far), Objectivism, of which Ayn Rand was the self-appointed guru. The idea that the individual is more important than the society and although it is regarded as a bit of a joke in serious academic circles, it cannot be overlooked simply because it has certainly become the attitude adopted by most people once they’ve made their first million. Maybe it was always so, or maybe it just simply was a case of Miss Rand’s book promotion getting majorly out of hand, but in any event, the result was that stock market high-flyers and corporate moguls now had a school of academic philosophy to justify his every act of greed and corruption.