Ralph Glasser (3 April 1916 – 6 March 2002) was a Scottish psychologist, economist, advisor to developing countries and author of a highly praised autobiographical quartet.
[1] Glasser was born of Jewish parents in Leeds, but when he was only a few months old his family moved to a tenement flat in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, which had gained notoriety as one of the biggest slums in Europe.
[3] Displaying a precocious intellect, Glasser studied the Theory of Relativity as a boy and attended a lecture by Albert Einstein when he was thirteen.
[1] He described the difficulties people had relating to a working-class student: "In pre-war days for a Gorbals man to come up to Oxford was unthinkable as to meet a raw bushman in the St James club, something for which there were no stock responses.
[4] He tended to hide the fact that he was Jewish, in view of the prejudice prevailing in the society of his day, which "burdened every step of our lives" and resulted in the need "to bury it beneath some protective colouring, so that we might go our private ways like everybody else".
After serving in the Second World War he resumed his studies, and met such celebrities of the time as Victor Gollancz, whose daughter he dated for a while, and Harold Laski.