  It was initially at reading parties that his pupils encountered a part of his life equally important to him as philosophy, his wife and children. What he describes as “a night of mostly bad dreams”, starting with his mother’s death in 1935, ended with his marriage in 1947 to Catherine Verney, which he calls “the best thing I ever did, and a source of lasting happiness” (2002: 272 &amp; 292). They shared a love of traditional Anglicanism (though her beliefs were more orthodox than his), and of music (especially choral and a cappella). A Hare reading party at Ewelme was always in part a music camp, with (for all those able to join in) a piano to play and madrigals to sing.  Everything equally involved their four children, John (who has published about his father, 2007: 184–248), and three daughters.  Without them, he would have felt incomplete even as a moral philosopher; for Aristotle’s question “What sort of person should I be?” gave way, for him, to the question “What sort of person should I bring up my children to be?”