W.J.H. Sprott (widely known as 'Sebastian') was the son of a country solicitor, educated at Felsted School. As a young man, he came up to Clare College, Cambridge, where he struck up a friendship with Maynard Keynes and became a member of the intellectual society known as the Apostles. In the early 1920s, he became an associate of Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and Ottoline Morell. Unable to get his novel published, he financed himself by acting as a demonstrator at the Psychological Laboratory in Cambridge, collaborating on occasion with James Strachey. After that time he moved to the University of Nottingham where he steadily rose through the ranks, retiring forty years later as an Emeritus Professor. He wrote several works on psychology and sociology, as well as the book 'Philosophy and Common Sense' (1949).