academic honours were heaped upon him, culminating in 1995 in a doctorate of letters "honoris causa" from cambridge. during his lifetime it was widely rumoured that he had never been offered a knighthood because he had been staunchly pacifist before the second world war, and during it a conscientious objector. the truth, however, is that he was offered one and declined it; partly from modesty, and partly because he thought it incongruous that a man who had refused to wield a bayonet should theoretically bear a sword.