 Karl Raimund Popper was born on 28 July 1902 in Vienna. His parents, who were of Jewish origin, brought him up in an atmosphere which he was later to describe as “decidedly bookish”. His father was a lawyer by profession, but he also took a keen interest in the classics and in philosophy, and communicated to his son an interest in social and political issues. His mother inculcated in him such a passion for music that for a time he contemplated taking it up as a career; he initially chose the history of music as a second subject for his Ph.D. examination. Subsequently, his love for music became one of the inspirational forces in the development of his thought, and manifested itself in his highly original interpretation of the relationship between dogmatic and critical thinking, in his account of the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, and, most importantly, in the growth of his hostility towards all forms of historicism, including historicist ideas about the nature of the “progressive” in music. The young Karl attended the local Realgymnasium, where he was unhappy with the standards of the teaching, and, after an illness he left to attend the University of Vienna in 1918, matriculating four years later. In 1919 he became heavily involved in left-wing politics and became for a time a Marxist. However, he was quickly disillusioned with the doctrinaire character of the latter, and soon abandoned it entirely. He also discovered the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Adler (he served briefly as a voluntary social worker with deprived children in one of the latter’s clinics in the 1920s), and heard Einstein lecture on relativity theory. The dominance of the critical spirit in Einstein, and its total absence in Marx, Freud and Adler, struck Popper as being of fundamental importance: the pioneers of psychoanalysis, he came to think, couched their theories in terms which made them amenable only to confirmation, while Einstein’s theory, crucially, had testable implications which, if false, would have falsified the theory itself.