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Brown Book 2012

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Lady Margaret Hall Oxford

The Brown Book

2012

Editor Carolyn Carr Gable End, The Mount Tetsworth, Oxfordshire, OX9 7AB [email protected]

Assistant Editors Obituaries

Reviews

Alison Gomm 3 The College High Street Drayton St Leonard OX10 7BB [email protected]

Judith Garner 1 Rochester Avenue Canterbury Kent CT1 3YE [email protected]

Lady Margaret Hall Oxford OX2 6QA Telephone: 01865 274362 [email protected] www.lmh.ox.ac.uk The Brown Book is produced by the Lady Margaret Hall Association with the support of the College. Contents page illustration: the triptych by Edward Burne-Jones from the LMH Chapel. Printed by Resourceprint Management Ltd, High Wycombe © 2012 Lady Margaret Hall. All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced without prior permission of the Editor. Opinions expressed in The Brown Book reﬂect those of the author alone.

Contents Editorial LMHA Committee: Membership, From the President, Report and Accounts, New Members From the Principal From the Development Director From the Chaplain From the Librarian Gaudy Report 2011: Continuing the tradition Twenty Years Since the End of the USSR: Reﬂections on popular uprisings then and now Happy 100th Birthday, Activated Sludge! Napoleon’s Women: Skirts around a throne Senior Members’ Career and Personal News Marriages, Births and Deaths Senior Members’ Publications In Memoriam Book Reviews Examination Results 2011 Matriculated 2011 Editor’s Notes Notices from LMH Dining in College

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Editorial The editors of The Brown Book, past and present, have always felt that the contents should, for the most part, stand ‘out of time’. You should be able to pick a copy from any year and ﬁnd that the topics are still relevant. This year, to some extent, we have not followed that remit. However, I am sure that those who were not able to hear Bridget Kendall’s excellent analysis, at the Autumn Social Meeting, of what makes an uprising become a revolution, would not have wanted us to turn down the opportunity to ask her to commit it to print. Similarly, Michael Broer’s talk on ‘Napoleon’s Women’ was much appreciated at the Gaudy last year, and we are grateful to him for summarising it here. At a dinner in Hall last year, Nick Hankins oﬀered to write an article on ‘Activated Sludge’! I was intrigued, and rightly so, as he has provided a fascinating insight into the whys and wherefores of our sewage system! It is appropriate, in this jubilee year, that we begin the Reviews section with Sarah Bradford’s Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times. We have our customary selection of historical oﬀerings, with Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of Burne-Jones and Antonia Southern’s of Sir John Harrington of Kelston, the inventor of the water-closet in the time of the ﬁrst Queen Elizabeth (continuing a somewhat lavatorial theme!). We also have letters from Diana Athill and poetry from Chris Considine. Interestingly, two books feature the Arabian Nights. There is an academic discussion of the tales from Marina Warner and a re-telling from Jasmine Richards. Indeed, we have a bountiful selection of ﬁction, including books by Lindsey Davis, Philip Hensher and Vanora Bennett for the adults and by Simon Mason and Jan Shirley for the young at heart. The obituaries section is always sad. Among many this year we include Dr Simon Price, Fellow in Ancient History, Dame Barbara Mills, the ﬁrst female Director of Public Prosecutions, and Dr Eva Gilles, Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology, as well as the photo-journalist Tim Hetherington, who was tragically killed while covering the conﬂict in Libya. As always I am indebted to my co-editors, Alison and Judith, who do all the hard work on the Obituaries and Reviews, and do a sterling job of prooﬁng and editing, and to Maya in the Development Oﬃce for always being there when needed. Carolyn Carr Editor 2

LADY MARGARET HALL ASSOCIATION COMMITTEE 2011–2012 President and Chairman: Mrs Carol Oster Warriner Dormers, Stanton Road, Oxford, OX2 9AY Vice-Presidents: Mrs Sally Chilver, Miss Catherine Avent, OBE Miss Elizabeth Mackenzie Hon Secretary Ms Alison Gomm, 3 The College, High Street, Drayton St Leonard, OX10 7BB Hon Treasurer Mrs Marion Michell, 244 Staines Road, Hounslow, Middlesex, TW3 3LX Editor of The Brown Book Dr Carolyn Carr, Gable End, The Mount, Tetsworth, Oxfordshire, OX9 7AB Retiring 2012: Dr Christine Gerrard Mr John Locker Mr Richard Osborne

Ordinary Members: Retiring 2013: Miss Jasmine Richards Dr Margaret Rothwell, CMG Miss Rachael Wood

Retiring 2014: Mrs Lucinda Bull Miss Judith Garner Mrs Heather Norman-Söderlind Co-opted by the Committee for 2011–2012: Miss Maya Evans, Alumni Relations Oﬃcer, Lady Margaret Hall Dr Penny Probert Smith, Vice-Principal, Lady Margaret Hall Mr Peter Watson, Development Director, Lady Margaret Hall 3

From the President I am very much enjoying my new role as President of LMHA since my election last July. My predecessor Mary Haynes did a wonderful job, in addition to all her hard work in cataloguing the LMH art collection, and has been very kind in her help and support. As I live in Oxford I have been fortunate enough to see for myself the wonderful changes that have taken place in LMH over the last few years and to enjoy the excellent new buildings. The LMHA has done sterling work in producing The Brown Book and organising alumni events in College and in other parts of the country, but we are keen to do more to strengthen the alumni links in the UK and further aﬁeld and to involve more people in the Alumni Association. The Development Oﬃce and the Alumni Association have both had ‘brainstorming sessions’ this year to consider what range of activities would be most attractive to the alumni, as we are conscious that we need to provide a variety of diﬀerent events and to provide them in diﬀerent locations. Going forward, as well as continuing to have the summer gaudy for certain year groups and a number of London-based, regional and international events, it is also hoped to have several anniversary celebration lunches and dinners and additional gaudies with smaller year-group spans so that alumni can get together to mark 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 years plus since graduating from LMH. This would ensure that alumni have an opportunity to meet with their contemporaries at regular intervals to mark key stages after graduation. The MA Ceremony in College followed by a reception is always very well attended, and feedback has suggested that further similar events in key years post-graduation would be popular. Dates would be published well in advance and well advertised so that alumni can get dates in their diaries and have time to get in touch with contemporaries to ensure good attendance. We would also like to arrange more subject-based days where alumni could meet with current Fellows and students, Carol Oster Warriner 4

as well as their contemporaries, and a series of lectures or debates could be organised. In the next few months we will be providing more information about future events and the Development Oﬃce plans to start sending out e-bulletins at regular intervals to keep alumni up to date with what is going on, as well as continuing to provide information in the usual way via the website, Facebook and publications. LMHA is the alumni body for everyone who has studied at LMH, whatever his or her age, subject or present activity, and we would like to see as many alumni as possible at future events. I am keen to hear from alumni about what they would like to see from their Alumni Association going forward and what events would be attractive to them, so please do give feedback, either directly to me (e-mail: thewarriners783@ btinternet.com) or via the usual channels. I also look forward to meeting as many of you as possible in the months and years ahead at one of the many functions we hope to organise. Carol Oster Warriner President

Report of the Committee The Committee met for ordinary business in July, November and February, with the usual session for proof-reading of The Brown Book prior to the February meeting. The 2011 AGM of the Association took place on Sunday 3 July, during the Gaudy weekend. It was Mary Haynes’s last AGM as President and the Principal thanked her for all that she has done with and for the College. In particular, she mentioned Mary’s creation of a greater variety and spread of events for alumni, and her success in attracting newer graduates to the LMHA Committee, extending the age range. In addition to all this, Mary has been working on a detailed, illustrated electronic catalogue of LMH’s art collection. Carol Oster Warriner (Gibson 1981) was elected to succeed Mary as President of the Association for a three-year term. The President announced the resignation of David Sewell from the post of Treasurer and expressed the Committee’s appreciation for the way that he had served in that role for the last eight years and as a 5

member of the Committee before that. Marion Michell (Cutler 1962) had agreed to be nominated to accede to the post and was duly elected. Two vacancies on the committee had been created by the resignation of Andrew Reid (1987) and Marion Michell’s appointment as Treasurer. Cindy Bull (Harrison 1979) and Heather Norman-Söderlind (Norman 1971) were elected as new ordinary members of the committee for three-year terms of oﬃce. The President gave her report, and the Principal spoke on current issues, particularly university funding, and answered questions. The social meeting was held on 24 October 2011 at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, where Bridget Kendall (1974) gave a timely talk about popular uprisings (see her article in this issue). The event was very well attended by alumni with matriculation dates ranging from 1939 to 2008, with a particularly strong representation from the 1970s. Alison Gomm Hon Secretary

Lady Margaret Hall Association Accounts 2010–2011 (Year from 1 August 2010 to 31 July 2011) Income Balance brought forward Brown Book donations Interest on bank accounts Total

£ Expenditure 2,117.25 Brown Book printing:

£ —

1,554.50 Oﬃcers’ expenses — Balance carried forward 3,673.04 1.29 £3,673.04 £3,673.04

The Committee is most appreciative of the donations from Senior Members towards the cost of The Brown Book. Further contributions are always welcome. Cheques payable to ‘Lady Margaret Hall’ with the endorsement ‘Brown Book’ can be sent to the Development Oﬃce which can also supply standing-order forms for regular donations. Marion Michell Hon Treasurer

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New Members Carol Oster Warriner (Gibson 1981 Jurisprudence) President of LMHA After graduating from LMH, Carol qualiﬁed as a solicitor in the city of London. She joined the Oxford ﬁrm of Linnells, as it then was, in 1988 and became a partner in 1991. Following a series of mergers, the ﬁrm is now part of Blake Lapthorn, a large regional UK law ﬁrm with four oﬃces in the south of England. Carol was Head of Propery Litigation in the Oxford oﬃce, and subsequently became the ﬁrm’s Risk Partner, dealing with all aspects of legal and non-legal risk, professional negligence claims, and claims made to the Legal Complaints Service. She was also on the ﬁrm’s Strategic and Management Boards. Carol retired from Blake Lapthorn in 2010 and was elected President of the LMHA in July 2011. She is also Chair of the Governors of Rush Common School, a state primary school in Abingdon, which is shortly to become an Academy and will be one of the ﬁrst Oxfordshire primary schools to do so. Heather Norman-Söderlind (Norman 1971 Modern Languages) Heather Norman-Söderlind joined the international news agency Reuters after LMH and enjoyed an international career in marketing communications, with overseas postings to New York, Vienna and Geneva before returning to London with the company in 1997. In 2002 she joined the British Library. She had been running the exhibitions and events programme there until her recent move to private consultancy where she continues to undertake PR/communications work. Heather is married to Swedish journalist Rolf Söderlind and has two stepdaughters. Lucinda (Cindy) Bull (Harrison 1979 Chemistry) Cindy is married with three children, aged 16, 14 and 11, and lives in Oxfordshire. She currently works for Johnson & Johnson as a Regional IT Manager, responsible for projects across the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. She has worked in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries in information and IT roles for 21 years, starting in 1990 with Glaxo (later GlaxoSmithKline), moving to Johnson & Johnson in 2001. Prior to joining this industry, she spent 5 years managing a bookshop in Carlisle, Cumbria, and before that was a chemistry teacher in a Berkshire comprehensive school. She is also Chair of Governors at Aylesbury High School, a girls’ grammar school and recently converted Academy. 7

From the Principal: Sustaining excellence LMH came into being because of our Founders’ dual passion for scholarship and equality. Edward Talbot and his colleagues valued very highly the academic education Oxford oﬀered, and were determined that the long exclusion of women from the University should be ended. Over the whole course of the College’s history, that same dual passion has inspired each generation of students and their teachers. It has given LMH an intellectually rigorous, straightforward, and open style that is instantly recognisable. We have always valued, and continue to prize, excellence, equality and fairness, education and research, and the College community both in Oxford and worldwide. What changes constantly is the context of public policy, culture, intellectual life and individual aspirations within which we live and work. Our particular challenge today is how to sustain excellence in teaching, learning, and research and at the same time ensure that access to learning at both undergraduate and postgraduate level is decided on merit and not the ability to pay. The introduction of a tuition fee of £9k per annum for UK/EU undergraduates from October 2012 could prove a major deterrent to students from low-income families. Government loans repayable only after a qualifying income level is reached, and then at a moderate percentage of income above that level, will go a considerable way towards keeping access open. This will be greatly reinforced by Oxford’s generous fee waivers and bursaries. Financially, it will be easier for students from low-income families to study at Oxford than at almost any other university in England. Excellent accommodation and facilities in College are also a major help to undergraduates. Readers of The Brown Book are helping LMH provide our share of Oxford Opportunity Bursaries, accommodation on site, and also hardship funds and grants for academic projects. We are enormously grateful. No one knows what the impact of higher undergraduate fees and loans will be on applications for postgraduate courses. It is widely feared that it might be catastrophic, as graduating students decide they cannot aﬀord to embark on further study and amass greater debt. It is absolutely essential for our society, as well as the UK economy, that UK students are able to take the postgraduate qualiﬁcations increasingly necessary for career advancement. Oxford lacks the comprehensive funding packages for postgraduate students oﬀered by our great North American competitors. It is extremely encouraging that funding postgraduate students 8

has suddenly risen fast up Oxford’s agenda, and that philanthropic support is beginning to make a real diﬀerence both at University level and in LMH. We are grateful to individual donors for seeing this need and assisting us, and also to Santander Bank for generously providing postgraduate scholarships and research travel awards at LMH. Meanwhile, detailed design work for new postgraduate accommodation continues, and we hope to begin building in the spring of 2013. Where teaching and research are concerned there is also good news. Several posts that were frozen on the University side have recently been released, and we are in the process of making joint appointments to tutorships and lecturerships in economics, classics, English, biology, and ﬁne art. The Herbert Smith Chair of English Private Law at LMH is being ﬁlled for next year. Through the kindness of Ockenden International, we will also welcome the ﬁrst holder of a new Junior Research Fellowship in Refugee Studies. Together these appointments represent a major strengthening of our outstanding teaching and research capacity. We have also welcomed Visiting Fellows from the USA and from Spain. I want to end with two observations about the research strength and intellectual and cultural vitality of LMH. The ﬁrst is by way of warm congratulations to Professor David Macdonald and his colleagues at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), closely associated since its foundation with LMH. Because of WildCRU’s exceptional achievement in research and education, Oxford University has been awarded one of The Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for Higher and Further Education in this Diamond Jubilee year. This is a great and fully deserved accolade. Meanwhile, here on site at LMH, it has become obvious that the new facilities, including the Simpkins Lee theatre, have helped stimulate an extraordinary burst of activity that brings substantial sectors of the University and the city through our doors to participate in what we are doing. In Hilary term 2012 alone we have hosted: talks by the Chief Rabbi on interfaith issues, the Chancellor Lord Patten on Oxford’s international outreach, the Master of St John’s College Cambridge on neurodegenerative diseases, and an award-winning novelist, Jane Urquhart, on her writing; an art exhibition with accompanying poetry; a conference on Women and War; graduate seminars; highly successful productions by our students and alumni; and a variety of concerts given by our talented musicians. LMH is buzzing with activity. Frances Lannon Principal 9

From the Development Director We have been delighted to welcome several new members to the LMHA Committee this year, including Carol Oster Warriner as the new President. Both internally in College and within the Committee we recognise the need to provide a wider range of opportunities for engaging with alumni and we have plans to put this into practice in the coming year, as Carol mentions in her report. We hope to see many more of you at events, and also, through regular email newsletter contact, to keep everyone more up to date with what is happening in College. We do need to have an email address for e-communications, and 60 per cent of our 7,000 alumni have provided one. Not everyone has email, but my guess is that the ﬁgure should be nearer the 90 per cent mark. If you think you are not receiving email communications from LMH please send a message to [email protected]. One way we do manage to communicate directly with a lot of alumni is through our student callers on the Annual Fund telephone campaign. The 2012 campaign is under way as I write. To those who make a contribution each year I am tremendously grateful, and the Annual Fund is a very important vehicle for supporting students, but I want to stress how the phone campaign is a great way for our students to convey the ﬂavour of LMH today, and also for them to discover what our alumni are doing. On the development side there is increasing focus on students and their costs. As everyone knows, the tuition fee for an undergraduate degree course at Oxford rises to £9,000 per year from October 2012, for a home/EU student. Adding in costs of accommodation, food and other general expenditure, estimated by the University’s Admissions Oﬃce on its website to be a further £7,600 (http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/ undergraduate_courses/student_funding/2012_living_costs.html), the annual cost of studying at LMH rises to £16,600, or £50,000 altogether for a three-year course. This is a lot of money. Now, the fees do not have to be paid up front. Loans are available for tuition fees, and also for maintenance. Repayment is not required until after graduation, when the graduate is employed and earning at least £21,000 per year. But it remains the case that most students graduating from 2015 onwards will have incurred much higher levels of debt than their predecessors as they begin their careers.

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Oxford has responded by making available a most generous set of fee waivers and bursaries, targeted at those from low-income families – probably the most generous of any UK university. The cost of these, probably not so widely known, is to be shared 50–50 between the University and each college. At LMH we expect this to cost around £250k per year, based on the number of students who at present receive Oxford Opportunity bursaries at LMH, about 25 per cent of our undergraduate population. So fundraising for student support is certainly now a key priority for us. Interestingly, the University’s admissions website also contains estimates of what it costs to live out of College in Oxford. For this year they suggest budgeting for £6,600 for rent and utilities, for usually a 12-month period, compared with the average of some £3,900 p.a. for a room in College. This was one of our reasons for building Pipe Partridge in the ﬁrst place and seeking support from our alumni to help us do so. The 1,000+ alumni and friends who have contributed to this project in the last few years can now see clearly how valuable their donations are to LMH students, who are now guaranteed at least three years living in College. Our donors have also helped to create a prize-winning building with facilities that have enhanced tremendously the life of all members of the College, and indeed the local community, with a whole series of lectures, seminars, ﬁlms, concerts and theatrical productions. In addition, we have seen a 50 per cent increase in income from our conference and hospitality services business in the ﬁrst full year of operation of Pipe Partridge, 2010–11. All in all, the project has been a stunning success, and we are enormously grateful to all our donors whose gifts, large and small, have made such a diﬀerence to LMH. All the more reason for cracking on with the second phase of the project, the construction of the Graduate Centre, the new Porters Lodge and a new front entrance quadrangle. An additional 40 study bedrooms will be created for graduate students and will allow us to oﬀer accommodation to almost all new graduates admitted each year. Graduate students face the same issues and costs involved with living out, and, with the majority of them coming from overseas, and unfamiliar in many cases with Oxford or even England, it is very important to have accommodation on campus, as well as a welcoming College community with a dedicated centre for Graduates. We have half the money for this project, and are working hard to raise the rest.

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The Principal mentions in her report how the funding for postgraduate students is rapidly becoming an important item on Oxford’s agenda, as a possible and, indeed, likely consequence of the increase in undergraduate fees for home/EU students. With the three-year undergraduate degree course costing about £50,000, those who have the talent and the desire to go on to advanced study may simply feel that they cannot face incurring any more debt. This could have serious consequences for fundamental and applied research, for staﬃng our universities, and for our society and our economy more generally. So it is clear that we are going to need to build funds for support for graduates as well as for undergraduates, both ﬁnancially and with accommodation and facilities. Here at LMH we have formulated clear strategic objectives to be achieved by 2015, with a matching set of fundraising objectives – the Three Pillar Strategy – for student funding, for facilities and new buildings, and, of course, for teaching and research. In supporting these three essential elements our donors support and sustain the very heart of the collegiate experience that is LMH. Our donors have helped us to make tremendous progress over the last few years. With continued and expanded support from alumni and friends I am conﬁdent we can successfully achieve our objectives. Peter Watson Development Director

From the Chaplain At the start of Hilary Term 2011, Professor John Day, Fellow in Theology, preached in Chapel and the service was taken by the Rev’d Glynis Beckett, Fellows’ Secretary at LMH. I was away at a Conference in New York and was at that moment engaged in a reconstruction of a full mediaeval Sarum rite Lady Mass sung in Latin – not, I hasten to add, a practice I anticipate introducing to Chapel worship. The next week the Rev’d Mark Lloyd (1998 Theology) returned to College, reminding us to take seriously the University motto: Dominus illuminatio mea. The idea of the University has changed enormously over its long life, but it is useful to be reminded of our ﬁrst principle. Mark was followed by the Rev’d Canon David Parrott, an expert in Canon Law and Vicar of St Lawrence Jewry, in the City of London. The Rev’d Dr William Whyte, Fellow in History at St John’s, Oxford, 12

preached at the College Corporate Communion. During Trinity Term the Faculty of Theology bought out my time as Chaplain so that I could get on with my book for Oxford University Press on the history of the Church through its buildings. Paula Clifford, Head of Theology for Christian Aid, came as Lay Chaplain in preparation for her ordination in July. Preachers for the term included the Rev’d Mark Woodruﬀ, Social Responsibility Advisor for the Sainsbury Charitable Trusts, Dr Rob Gilbert, Fellow in Chemistry at Magdalen College, Oxford Binsey Poplars by Roger Wagner (also ordained with Paula in July), Vienna Frances-Mullins, a current student in theology at LMH who is going forward for selection for ordination, and the Rt Rev’d Martin Nyaboho, Bishop of Makumba in Burundi. At the Lady Margaret Day Service we were delighted to welcome the Very Rev’d June Osborne, Dean of Salisbury, who preached about women’s education. June is the most senior woman cleric in the Church of England. On the Saturday at the end of term, 23 June, a huge number of colleagues from LMH and the University crowded into every corner of St Margaret’s Church for the funeral of Simon Price who died after a long and brave ﬁght. He was an inspirational colleague in every way. Simon’s obituary can be read later in this issue. The Corporate Communion in Michaelmas was a joyful occasion when Gemma Sedgwick was baptised by her friend and colleague Glynis Beckett and conﬁrmed by Bishop Bill Down, an Assistant Bishop in the Diocese and formerly Bishop of Bermuda. The next week, the Worshipful Rev’d Canon Philip Bursell, Chancellor of the Dioceses of Oxford and Durham, gave the ﬁrst of a series of sermons on ‘Faith in the Arts’. He was followed by the painter Roger Wagner who has twice held exhibitions in College, one with engravings of images and translations of the Psalms and one with exquisite paintings of ‘Binsey Poplars’, one of which now hangs in the Principal’s room. Maxwell Hutchinson, Past 13

President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, was next in the series, which concluded with a sermon given by Canon James Woodward, Canon Steward of St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. Carols by Candlelight closed the term and the year with a typically full Chapel and a blaze of light for the coming of the Light of the World. Allan Doig Chaplain

From the Librarian In the course of the year the following have kindly donated books to the library, in many cases written by themselves: Helen Barr, Berghahn Books, Jane Bliss, Michael Broers, John Carey, the Charlotte M. Yonge Fellowship, Xon de Ros, Nathalie Ferrand, Anne Frith, Amanda Foreman, Tom Forkin, Angelica Goodden, Douglas Gray, Vicky Harper, Paula Heinonen, Brian Hillyard, Clive Holmes, Institute of Gender Studies, Maria Jaschok, Marie-Chantal Killeen, Fiona MacCarthy, Pauline Matarasso, Ewan McKendrick, Sheelagh Neuling, Helen Oppenheimer, Marjorie Ord, Jennifer Owen, the Oxford Foundation for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artiﬁcial Intelligence, Gillian Peele, Susan Rose, Gill Rowe, Antonia Southern, Nicholas Shrimpton, Ross Stevenson, Grant Tapsell, Thomas Weber, and Susan Wollenberg. Half of the Norah May Thomas (1968) donation to the library (a very generous bequest of £15,000 which was acknowledged in last year’s Brown Book) has been spent in the following way: a small amount on specialist music cataloguing which completed the cataloguing of LMH’s excellent music section, and the replacement of all the library student computers. This was very necessary, and would have been diﬃcult to aﬀord otherwise. In thanks for this gift, one of the library’s blue and gold plaques bearing her name has been placed in one of the unnamed bays in the Gallery in the English literature section. We also gratefully acknowledge another legacy: £500 towards book purchases was left to the library by Mary Galloway (Odgers 1932). This year has seen LMH library absorbing the small library of the Institute of Gender Studies, which is now aﬃliated to LMH. This is a welcome and interesting addition to the library. As a former women’s college we already have a strong collection of books relating to women’s

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studies. The Gender Studies books add to and enhance this. The collection, together with existing LMH books within this area of study, is housed in the small room at the head of the Gallery staircase. Anne Pennington (1952; Fellow and Tutor in Russian 1959–80) was the main subject of the library exhibition this year, and by good luck this coincided with a university appeal in her name to fund a bursary for undergraduates to study South Slavonic languages. On display were both books written by her, showing the range of her scholarly interests and translation skills, and some of the books from her own collection bequeathed to the library. Anne Pennington is one of those donors to LMH library who had a major inﬂuence on the composition of the sections to which they gave. This can be seen in the Slavonic section, where this bequest in 1981 nearly doubled the library’s Slavonic holdings and was particularly strong in Old Russian and Church Slavonic literature and philology. It can also be seen in the Art section, which, as a result of her bequest, now contains books on the art, architecture and folk art of Eastern Europe. These books were mostly published in Eastern Europe, and are not to be found elsewhere in Oxford libraries. This Michaelmas term of 2011 saw the University-wide launch of a new library management system. We have struggled with certain aspects of it, and are glad to have come through the term more or less successfully. I should like to thank Jeremiah Dancy and Troy Cudworth (library assistants) for their help in coping with the initial problems and later diﬃculties. Thanks are also due to the new library fellow, Mary MacRobert, whose monitoring of the weaknesses of the new system has been encouraging and helpful. Finally, I would like to thank Clive Holmes (Library Fellow from 2002 to 2011) for all his support and unfailing interest in, and commitment to, the library during this time. This was a time of several library projects, which Clive shepherded through. The LMH rare books collection was catalogued online, and thus its treasures have been made more widely known. Over this period the library extension into Lynda Greer was planned and created. This was a major and successful development for the library. Roberta Staples Librarian

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Gaudy June 2011: Continuing the tradition On 29 June, just days before this year’s Gaudy weekend, the University’s Encaenia garden party was held at LMH – ‘Yes, 1,600 of us in full fancy dress,’ remarked the Principal. To the visitor remembering, as I was, the College of 50 years ago, this ability to accommodate frequent, large-scale events marks a notable change. But, apparently, it is now routine. ‘Here we just move on from one big event to another,’ Rosa, long-time doyenne of the kitchens, told me, while she rearranged the serving system to deal with a sudden rush of breakfasters on Gaudy Sunday morning. ‘We don’t need special planning.’ Decisions about the Gaudy do start being made back in January, when speakers are decided upon, but thereafter, the Development oﬃce told me, all simply goes according to plan. LMH, one realises, is a big machine which, like a Bentley or Rolls Royce perhaps, runs with easy, concealed power. Apparently, too, the Gaudy has always run smoothly. Oliver Mahony, archivist for LMH, found that the ﬁrst one was held in 1893 when The Brown Book reported that ‘preparation for this new event was predictably smooth’. In the early days, the Gaudy was a full weekend aﬀair, lasting from Friday until Monday. The lectures at that time might be on topics such as the needs of the poor in London or work in a Mission abroad (once, excitingly, on the Suﬀrage question), and there was also entertainment: for instance, a violin recital by Principal Henrietta JexBlake. But the basic formula – dinner in Hall, services in the Chapel and a garden tea party on Sunday – was set in those ﬁrst days. The only plaint recorded – one still relevant in 2011, perhaps an inevitable one – comes in a report on the 1910 Gaudy when: ‘there were so many public engagements that the opportunities of meeting friends and renewing acquaintances were fewer’. This is still true today. For the only real diﬃculty at an LMH Gaudy is deciding which, if any, of the events to miss in order to spend more time catching up with old friends – and talking to others, barely remembered perhaps, but with whom even the shy can make conversation conﬁdently, with one’s common background as a bond. So, if you had to miss this year’s celebrations, what might you have decided to attend or forgo? What, that is, was planned for us back in January 2011? 16

First: the special Saturday tea parties. The 50th anniversary party for those who came up in 1961 was held in a room in Deneke with, next door, a 60th anniversary party for both the 1951 matriculation year and for those from 1948 who went down 60 years ago. Our 1961–4 group had raised funds for LMH to commemorate our ‘Golden Jubilee’ and we were given a very grand, icing-inscribed cake to celebrate. This was followed by a visit en masse to see the plaque recording our achievement permanently. Thus we went from the well-remembered Deneke building, with its dim, wide, wood-ﬂoored corridor, to encounter the new LMH – the Pipe Partridge undergraduate building in the arched colonnade of which the fund raisers’ plaques are sited. A ‘photo op’, of course, and portable phones and cameras came out – the former far outnumbering the latter. At 6.00 p.m. came a brilliant recital in the Chapel by Dr Jonathan White (2002 Organ Scholar). His accompanying leaﬂet gave very helpful details on each of the pieces played – a model one wishes professional theatres, with their often emptily lavish programmes, would follow! He showed us what a range of sound the 1930s LMH organ can produce, going from J. S. Bach’s thunder to F. A. Guilmant’s fantasy on two English melodies to make us smile. The Evensong service which followed was choral, the singing supplied by three well-balanced voices from the LMH Consort, led by Dr Cissie Fu (2001 Politics) and afterwards we listened with humility to the customary reading where Solomon, oﬀered anything he desires, chooses wisdom and discernment. After this there was just time to change into evening clothes for more happy reunion talk at the 7.15 p.m. drinks reception in the marquee – from where we had enchanting views of LMH’s lawns and borders as the evening sun slanted through the wooded parts of the gardens leading down to the Cherwell. For our year, it surely brought back memories of the lovely 1964 LMH summer ball – at that time a major, innovative event. Another key moment came as we ﬁled through the door into Hall for dinner. Is it the remembered tension over being late and having to bow to the high table which makes that spot in the College so poignantly memorable? On this occasion there was no high table, so to speak, as the Principal sat in the centre of one of the ﬁve long tables. The near-roar of conversations proved, in decibels, how much the evening with its excellent dinner was enjoyed. The toast to the College 17

was proposed by Gill Perrin (music scholar Gill Hughes-Thomas as we remember her). In an elegant preamble, she mused on ‘how consistently physical setting is the framework for memory. We remember’ she suggested, ‘people, events, in particular places.’ For our year group, of course, the often-asked question ‘Where were you when you heard J. F. Kennedy had been shot?’ is very likely to ﬂash us straight back to LMH as it was in 1963. Yet, so well have all the new buildings been ﬁtted in and around the old ones, it was almost surprising to be reminded by Gill how the main road used to come right up to the front door in the centre of Talbot, now at the heart of the College, when she talked about changes, and about the opportunities we were given during our days here. ‘We feel for LMH as it faces the uncertainties of the immediate future and applaud the present direction of the College,’ she said. Later, Gill remarked how marvellously responsive an audience LMH senior members make: ‘An audible response to virtually everything.’ The Principal’s speech, grave in tone, encapsulated LMH through the decades, praising senior members’ achievements and reporting how the College has responded to the times and risen to challenges. She outlined the very serious problems faced in this time of ﬁnancial uncertainty for higher education. It could have been a disheartening account, but her determined manner left us sure that the College is responding actively to this current challenge. The energetic continued the evening with more talk over coﬀee and drinks back in the marquee – with views, now, out over the dark-shadowed gardens – to end the Saturday events. Then Sunday started with Communion in the chapel followed by a wonderfully extensive breakfast in Hall – so eﬀectively run despite a sudden rush of numbers. The morning lectures really were ‘not to be missed’. In the ideally appointed new Simpkins Lee theatre, its raked seating obviating the neck-craning of Talbot days, we were treated to good slides illustrating an amusing yet informative talk on ‘Napoleon’s Women’ by LMH Modern History tutor Dr Michael Broers. Not as saucy as the title suggests, the talk enumerated mother, sisters and wives and the countries they were, astonishingly, given to run during the Empire. After a coﬀee break came a fascinating talk by Jenny Rose Carey (1981 Education) on ‘1920s American Gardens and The Landscaping Ladies’. Jenny, who is director of the Ambler Arboretum in Philadelphia, as well as a member of the LMH Advisory Council, had archive pictures – many from old, glass lantern slides – showing US women gardeners when women were newly enfranchised (19th amendment, 1920) when 18

there was a huge increase in the number of US gardens built and also in their diversity. The last formal event of the weekend was the 40th Anniversary lunch for the 1971 matriculation year in Hall. For the main party there was a choice: to enjoy the excellent buﬀet lunch seated in the marquee, or to brave the tables outside, in welcome, albeit ﬁtful, sunshine. (Another piece of LMH lore is that ‘it never rains on a Gaudy!’ and this held good once more.) After the annual general meeting of the LMH Association, the gardens ﬁlled for the main Gaudy garden party, featuring candy ﬂoss, bouncy castle and swing boats for children and grandchildren. While this was an eventful day out in itself for some, for our year there were ﬁnal walks through the gardens (surely more beautifully kept now than in the 1960s?) and ﬁnal talks. And so Gaudy 2011 came to its close. Smoothly, of course. Deborah Land (Murdoch 1961 English)

Michael Broers lecturing in the Simpkins Lee theatre during the Gaudy weekend

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Twenty Years Since the End of the USSR: Reﬂections on popular uprisings then and now My life as a BBC foreign correspondent began in 1989 when I was sent to Moscow just as Eastern Europe was about to collapse, with the Soviet Union not long behind. With the recent 20-year anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union coinciding with the uprisings in the Arab world and new stirrings of broad dissent against Putin in Russia, I have found myself thinking a lot about what happened 20 years ago and some of the ‘coloured’ revolutions that have happened since, in an attempt to identify diﬀerences and similarities and see what lessons can be learnt about popular risings. There are many intriguing questions. – What makes a popular uprising spring up, and how far is it predictable? – Is there always an identiﬁable tipping point to mark the shift from minor protest to mass movement? – What causes uprisings to fail, either by petering out or being crushed? – What role does the use of violence and brutality by security forces play? When does it instil fear and when does it swell the ranks of protestors by prompting a backlash? – What role do the media play and how far is that changing? This is merely an initial attempt to pull out a few common threads based on personal and anecdotal observations. More comprehensive analysis will no doubt come later. The huge wealth of material to draw upon from the past two decades will be a treasure trove for future researchers. What prompts an uprising that turns out to be transformative? One common feature seems to be unpredictability: such events often emerge apparently out of the blue. The rally may be formally organised by activists, but the ‘swarming’ of a crowd to a signiﬁcant size is rarely orchestrated. In Tunisia in December 2010, it was a vegetable seller who set ﬁre to himself out of desperation who set the ball rolling. But if this was the trigger which started a revolution, it seemed almost accidental. Others had before, and have since, set light to themselves in similar protests across the region, but barely been noticed. In Egypt in January 2011, as far as I know, there was no expectation from opposition leaders that they were on the verge of a showdown that would force President Mubarak out of oﬃce. They, too, were taken aback at what happened. 20

Similarly, in Russia last autumn there was little expectation that the Duma elections in December 2011 would spark oﬀ a widespread protest. Three leading opposition leaders I spoke to in Moscow in November went so far as to reject the notion of any large-scale outpouring of dissent. When I asked if an ‘Arab spring’-style change was possible, they all thought it was probably years away. That may still prove to be true, but not one of them predicted that just three weeks later they would be spearheading a large-scale protest movement responding to suspicions of election fraud. And spontaneity was also the hallmark, 20 years ago, of the response of Muscovites to the attempted Soviet coup of August 1991. Hardline military and security chiefs tried to sideline President Gorbachev, seize power and end his perestroika reforms, doubtless calculating that the Russian population would largely stay passive. They failed to reckon with the tens of thousands of ordinary citizens in the capital who took to the streets to stop them. Of course the spontaneity of the moment of an uprising does not explain everything. There is almost always a groundswell of growing dissatisfaction that precedes it. In modern Arab societies, as in the old Soviet Union or Russia today, resentments were festering. Strikes and protests were commonplace in Egypt in the months preceding the big Tahrir Square protest. And while in diﬀerent countries there may have been diﬀerent levels of government control or repression, grievances were similar: anger at cronyism and the corruption of the political élite; a sense of injustice at the growing gap between rich and poor; frustration at political and economic stagnation; fury at elections that seemed to have been ‘stolen’; and an overriding sense of humiliation and lack of dignity. Perhaps in the build-up to an uprising we should not underestimate the importance of new public spaces which allow people to air these grievances. The opportunity to take resentment out of the ‘kitchen’ and into the open air, so to speak, has a galvanising eﬀect. It allows individuals to share and reinforce their anger. It empowers them. And opening up media opportunities not only means more free expression, it also brings new input, glimpses of other worlds beyond one’s own borders which reinforce a desire to change things. In the days of the USSR, underground dissident movements played an important role in challenging the oﬃcial viewpoint. But, because of censorship, the impact on their own societies was probably less than their inﬂuence on the outside world. Most of their fellow Soviet citizens kept their heads down and kept to themselves any misgivings they had 21

about the world they lived in. It was only when Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign took oﬀ in the 1980s, and bestowed on them the licence to voice their opinions fearlessly, that a common critical bond was created across society. Similarly, in the Arab world, analysts have for years been commentating on the empowering nature of Arab satellite channels, such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and, latterly, the BBC Arabic Service. For the ﬁrst time, television screens in cafés across the region oﬀered a frank discussion of politics in Arabic, including unfettered criticism of Arab governments. These became portals to reﬂect, validate and magnify public antagonism. And today in Putin’s Russia the largely uncensored internet has, it seems, played a pivotal role. For the last few years it has been spreading its reach, occupying the vacuum left when the Kremlin stiﬂed proper debate on Russia’s state-run television. By the end of 2011, the internet for many educated Russians had become an alternative universe, where open discussion and satire ﬂourished, an important breeding ground for political activism. ‘When I step out of my front door I do not live in a free society,’ one young Russian told me, ‘but online I can live in a democratic world.’ So if a signiﬁcant uprising is usually a collective phenomenon, a vehicle for dissent that is seeded by activists and emboldened by the media, but then propelled forward by its own momentum, at what point does it become signiﬁcant, tip over into being an event that the authorities cannot ignore? Political leadership, of course, plays an important part, but is it always as signiﬁcant as it is made out to be? In August 1991, Boris Yeltsin famously stood on a tank to rally Russians to defy the attempted coup. But the reality was that few people witnessed his gesture. At that time most information was being circulated by radio (including the BBC, but also one independent Russian radio station, Ekho Moscow) or by rumour. Instead, it was the size of the crowd, not what Yeltsin did, that was pivotal. The sea of ordinary citizens who ﬂocked to the Russian parliament was surely what made the Soviet armed forces reluctant to go ahead with a plan to storm the building. Similarly in Egypt’s Tahrir Square it seems it was, above all, the size and mood of the crowd that established its strength, not the actions and words of individual activists. And the test in Russia today is not how organised or united the opposition leaders are (possibly not very), but how large a crowd of ordinary citizens can be persuaded to turn out to stand in the cold and keep up the display of opposition to Putin’s government. 22

If size is a critical issue, then here, too, the media can play an important part. Revolutions, it seems, tend to come in waves: 1968, 1989, and now 2011–12. Peer pressure is enticing. There is a circular, self-referential quality about seeing yourself or people like you on television. If those you want to identify with are doing something you admire, you want to join them. A BBC colleague told me the story of one young Egyptian activist in Tahrir Square last year who recounted that he had been unemployed, sitting at home on the sofa next to his mother as usual, watching television. But when he saw the crowd of people pouring on to Tahrir Square to join the protest he thought “I can do that”, got his jacket and rushed down to join them. Within days he was politicised, transformed into an activist. This ‘copy cat’ instinct was certainly true, early on in the Syrian uprising, for one young protestor in Homs reached by phone. He explained that he and his friends saw this as a chance in a lifetime: ‘If they can do this elsewhere in the Arab world, then we must do it, too. We don’t want to be left behind. We may never get another chance in decades.’ Sheer volume can also contribute to a loss of fear. Emboldened by numbers, a crowd will push its luck. If the forces of law and order hold back or retreat, a crowd will occupy that space and take uncharacteristic risks. When you are part of a wave of humanity, you ‘join the moment’ and to hell with the consequences. Think of the behaviour of those taking part in riots in the UK in the summer of 2011 as another example. Once an uprising poses a challenge, obviously the response of the authorities is critical. In Eastern Europe in 1989, Gorbachev wanted to avoid violent crackdowns and instead urged Communist governments to reform themselves, thereby encouraging peaceful demonstrators to feel they were half sanctioned by Moscow to pursue their demand for revolution. In 1991, the hard-line coup leaders in Moscow may have wanted to turn the clock back, but they had no stomach for a bloody battle. Their decision to take part in a televised press conference that showed their trembling hands and incoherent responses was their undoing. Within a couple of days their attempted coup d’état had crumbled. Last year in Tunisia and Egypt, a showdown was avoided when the military and security forces decided not to challenge the demonstrators. Of course there are plenty of other cases where a violent crackdown has crushed a rebellion. Remember the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 in China. Remember the devastating defeat of Iran’s election protests, the so-called ‘green revolution’ in 2009. But the use of force by some regimes does not always have the desired eﬀect. Brutality by the 23

authorities can on occasion, it seems, inﬂame the situation. In February 2011, Colonel Gaddaﬁ’s attempt to crush an uprising in Benghazi not only failed: it led to military defections to join the rebels and prompted a wave of rebellions in other towns. A civil war ensued, including a NATO-led air campaign, before the Gaddaﬁ regime fell. But the pattern of events showed that ordering a crackdown can be a gamble and may swell the ranks of those protesting, as President Assad is now ﬁnding in Syria. Once again, the role of the media here seems to be pivotal. When brutal actions are carried out in the glare of global publicity, it is harder for repression to do its work. I was well aware of that as Moscow correspondent in the early 1990s. A crackdown by the Soviet authorities to quell a demonstration in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, in early 1990 probably caused hundreds of deaths but was barely reported – the foreign media were barred from ﬂying there. An attempted crackdown in the Baltics in early 1991, however, with relatively few deaths was quickly aborted, in part probably because of the impact of foreign coverage. Last year an uprising in Bahrain which was beginning to threaten the country’s monarchy was swiftly stiﬂed with the help of troops from neighbouring Gulf countries. There are other factors which made this confrontation unique, not least because of the Shia/Sunni divide in Bahrain. But one reason, I believe, why it was squashed so quickly and eﬀectively was because the global media spotlight had moved on from Bahrain to Libya by the time the tanks rolled in. So does the so-called ‘new media’ of Youtube, Twitter and Facebook make a diﬀerence? Undoubtedly. Imposing censorship and controlling information has become much more diﬃcult. The advent of smart phones and other new technology, such as Skype, allows opposition networks to be mobile, international and immediate. It means diaspora groups can now be much more integrated into an opposition movement on the ground and play a much more eﬀective role in disseminating information. And it means, for the ﬁrst time, that regimes have lost their ability to monopolise and control visual images. This is especially important when a confrontation has deteriorated into open conﬂict and bloodshed. Good-quality still photos and moving footage on mobile phones, uploaded from the scene of a battle and delivered globally in seconds, have meant that in both Libya and Syria it has been impossible for the authorities to impose an eﬀective media blackout. It is incredible how far communications have travelled from my early days as a reporter in Russia in the 1980s. Then there were no mobile 24

phones, no internet, no global satellite TV. Photocopying machines were locked up at night to prevent them from being used for ‘subversive’ activities. And the Soviet authorities thought they could still keep the lid on dissent by jamming short-wave radio. Who knows what will have changed in another 20–25 years? Bridget Kendall (Modern Languages (Russian) 1974)

Happy 100th Birthday, Activated Sludge! The phrase ‘activated sludge’ might evoke for you the realms of science ﬁction. Perhaps it conjures up images of a low-budget, special eﬀects production from a 1970s episode of Doctor Who. Or maybe it brings to mind the grey goo of a doom-laden novel by Michael Crichton, teeming with nano-robots and poised in its foamy and pulsating menace to take over the world. Strange indeed, then, that the reality of our activated sludge is at once far more mundane, yet cause indeed for our gratitude – not least to the engineers behind its creation. However, Ladies and Gentlemen, I must warn you that the topic of my present discourse is quite lavatorial, and most certainly rather mucky; it is one to which the chattering classes have remained markedly averse. Those of a nervous disposition may turn away now. A quick leaf through my Chamber’s Dictionary brings us closer to the innocuous truth: ‘soft mud or mire: half-melted snow: a slimy precipitate, as from sewage: a dark yellowish or brownish green’. And this humble invention, which lies at the heart of modern sanitation and sewage treatment for large urban populations, will soon be 100 years old. We should be truly grateful, indeed, in this country because today 1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water, while a shocking 2.4 billion lack any proper sanitation. Yet 80 per cent of diseases in the developing world are water-borne and 2.2m deaths per year are related to poor sanitation. Tragically, these deaths mainly occur in children under the age of ﬁve. Water is undoubtedly one of the planet’s most precious and ﬁnite natural resources. During the last 100 years, while the population of the world has tripled, the consumption of water has increased six-fold. Today, irrigation, industry and municipal use account for 70, 20 and 10 per cent of total water withdrawals, respectively. The high environ25

mental cost of this increased withdrawal has been staggering – some rivers no longer reach the sea, and many others are at risk (Table 1). Fifty per cent of the world’s wetlands have disappeared, 20 per cent of freshwater ﬁsh are endangered or extinct, and many of the most important groundwater aquifers are being extracted, with levels dropping several metres per year and some already damaged permanently by sea-water ingress. Table 1: Summary of threatened rivers

River basin

Corresponding threat

Salween–Nu

Infrastructure – dams

Danube

Infrastructure – navigation

La Plata

Infrastructure – dams and navigation

Rio Grande

Water over-extraction

Rio Bravo

Water over-extraction

Ganges

Water over-extraction

Indus

Climate change

Nile–Lake Victoria

Climate change

Murray–Darling

Invasive species

Mekong–Lancang

Over-ﬁshing

Yangtze

Pollution

Sources: WWF, the Environment Agency, the EU Observer.

The modern challenges and successes in sanitation, and the sewage treatment which underpins it, date back directly to the Industrial Revolution, the increase in urban populations, the deluge created by ﬂushing toilets, and, by extension, another engineering miracle with which we will begin our story – the modern WC cistern. In fact, the invention of the latter was actually prompted by the need to save water. Following the Metropolis Water Act of 1872, one of the ﬁrst regulations was aimed at curbing the terrible waste of water in London’s existing lavatories. Originally, the water for a ﬂushing toilet was provided from a large tank, via a chain-operated outlet valve. The problem was that the valve would inevitably leak, or even be deliberately jammed open. So, eventually a huge cry went out for a ‘water waste preventer’. And so it was that Mr Thomas Crapper invented the ‘valveless waste preventer’ – the 26

WC cistern, as toilet users throughout the world know it today. At the heart of this invention was a siphon – gravity-powered ﬂow, moving uphill and eventually to a point more downhill than the start. Pulling the chain caused a plate attached to a rod to move up, which took water with it from a chamber and up one side of the partition in a central pipe, and overﬂowing down into the other side. The water brought up from the chamber therefore set up a siphonic action, sucking all water out of the chamber and the connected tank beyond, and sending it to gush down the ﬂush pipe with considerable velocity – essential to clean the basin. The siphon action would thus exhaust itself, preventing further leakage of water. Upon emptying the cistern, the low water level caused a ﬂoat to lower (which was made from copper then and plastic now), pulling an attached lever and opening a water supply inlet. When the rising water level had lifted the ﬂoat suﬃciently, the supply would close again. The water would then just stay there, until the chain was pulled again. The saying ‘a prophet is without honour in his own land’ has never been more true than in the case of Thomas Crapper. His ingenuity and perseverance brought to perfection one of mankind’s most useful inventions. Yet unlike the Earl of Sandwich, Lord Chesterﬁeld, the Earl of Davenport, Lord Cardigan, or the Duke of Wellington, the name of this clever Victorian engineer has not been incorporated unto the language. Since he was a commoner, perhaps it was mere snobbery. But this argument fails in the case of innovations such as macintoshes, tarmacadam, gladstones, bowlers, watts, diesel, hoover, volts, and so on. Poor Crapper. To interpret his lack of recognition in prudish etymological terms would also be historically incorrect. It was left to American troops returning after the First Word War to give the man his due over there, so that the Dictionary of American Slang could report that the term ‘crapper’ had come into common usage by 1930. And that, by a process of linguistic evolution, in 1949 Arthur Miller was writing in Death of a Salesman that ‘I’m not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that kind’, a connotation which has now drifted, unfortunately, back across the Atlantic. Yet at least the inventor was ultimately to go on and receive a Royal Appointment from King Edward VII to install the drains and bathrooms at Sandringham Palace. But in sanitation matters, the early Victorians had progressed little from the Middle Ages, when domestic sewage was simply emptied into the street. Indeed, the word ‘Hello’ – as much a warning as a greeting – may have arisen for this very reason, evolving from ‘à l’eau!, à l’eau!’. Any river, stream or ditch was seen as fair game for sewage disposal. In 27

the early years of Victoria’s reign, the Fleet River, now Farringdon Street EC4, remained an open sewer until 1844. In her book Victoria R.I., Elizabeth Longford wrote: In 1858, when the Queen and Prince Albert had attempted a short pleasure cruise on the Thames, its malodorous waters drove them back to land within a few minutes. That summer, a prolonged wave of heat and drought exposed its banks, rotten with the sewage of an overgrown, undrained city. Because of the stench, Parliament had to rise early.

This latter occurrence was so frequent that it led to debate as to whether the Houses of Parliament were tenable as a seat of government. Could democracy actually function without adequate sanitation? Neither was the River Cam the best of places to enjoy a pleasure outing. In Period Piece, Gwen Raverat wrote: I can remember the smell very well, for all the sewage went into the river, till the town was at last properly drained. There is a tale of Queen Victoria being shown over Trinity College by the Master, Dr Whewell, and saying, as she looked down over a bridge: ‘What are all those pieces of paper ﬂoating down the river?’ To which, with great presence of mind, he replied: ‘Those, ma’am, are notices that bathing is forbidden.’

We were surely not amused. Around this time, plumbing was, to say the least, a hazardous occupation, laying oneself and the general population open to two main dangers – explosion or dread disease. The foul, methane-rich fumes wafting up from the poor drains and cesspools were often highly combustible. In The Architects’ Journal, H. A. J. Lamb quotes from a contemporary piece on the hazards of the plumber in the nineteenth century: Two workmen had a narrow escape for their lives, for, upon opening the ﬂags, one of them bowing down to examine the shaft, was suddenly surrounded by ﬂame from a lighted candle in his hand. There was an explosion which split a water bucket, stunned the men, and shut the door, which was half open, with a great noise.

The fume hazard led to the invention of the ‘disconnecting trap’. You may not realise it, but the drains from your house ﬁrst go through your own mini-sewage disposal system before reaching the mains. All the drains rendezvous at the disconnecting trap. The waste water enters at the open lip of the trap, goes down under a bend and on up through, at the right, to the mains drain. Water is always lodged across this u-bend, forming a perfect seal and preventing the sewer gases from coming up. You can ﬁnd the same u-bend in a lavatory basin and under the kitchen sink, as made famous by those TV bleach adverts. 28

Several highly infectious water-borne diseases were rampant in the nineteenth century. London experienced no fewer than ﬁve cholera epidemics between 1832 and 1872. Typhoid and smallpox were almost entirely traceable to bad sanitation. Queen Victoria’s beloved Albert died of typhoid in 1861, while Edward, Prince of Wales, was lucky to survive an attack in 1871. In 1870, one in every 3,000 of the British population died of typhoid; by 1900, the death rate was still as high as one in 5,000 (for comparison, Britain’s death toll on the roads today is around one in 7,000). By the second half of the nineteenth century, huge volumes of putrescible water-borne waste overwhelmed the capacities of any receiving rivers or streams. A town of 100,000 people could generate a sewage ﬂow equivalent to ten Olympic-sized swimming pools per day. Though a signiﬁcant fraction of the solids could be removed via settling, discharge of sewage across open land and allowing nature to take its course – the cesspool – became the accepted solution to cope with the sanitation problem. While this may have been feasible at ﬁrst, it placed increasing pressure on local councils: growing populations meant greater demand for housing, making it ever more diﬃcult to ﬁnd the land required. The same town of 100,000 people needed a land area equivalent to 30 football pitches. To circumvent the problems caused by land shortages, councils sought ‘artiﬁcial’ methods of sewage treatment. Two basic methods evolved, and they are still the two basic methods in use today. The ﬁrst method to evolve mimicked the natural percolation of sewage through soil, providing the combination of microbes and air essential to prevent putrefaction. The percolating or trickling ﬁlter used today evolved via progressive innovations: the use of stone media in place of soil, the provision of both under drains and air ventilation, the use of rotating arms to evenly distribute sewage ﬂow, and adding sedimentation tanks downstream to settle out the excess solid matter generated – known as ‘sludge’. Such ﬁlters are still used for villages and small-town treatment works today; take a train journey, and you are almost bound to see one. Trickling ﬁlters caused both a big improvement in the eﬄuent quality from sewage treatment and a reduction in the land required – the area required for our town of 100,000 was now just one and a half football pitches. But for larger towns and cities, the land requirement was still a big issue. 29

And so to ‘activated sludge’. While percolating ﬁlters evolved from the action of soil on sewage, activated sludge mimicked the eﬀects of aeration occurring in rivers. Since organic matter was known to deplete oxygen levels in rivers through its biological degradation by microbes, several sanitation engineers attempted to treat sewage by aerating it prior to discharge. It worked. The problem was, it took far too long. In 1913, two sanitation engineers, E. Ardern and W. T. Lockett, were conducting research for the Manchester Corporation Rivers Department at Davyhulme Sewage Works. The huge breakthrough they achieved was to continuously aerate the sewage until fully treated – through conversion of all the degradable content responsible for biological oxygen demand as well as the ammonia content. They found that aerating a batch of sewage for ﬁve weeks resulted in a settled sludge layer and a clear, treated eﬄuent, suitable for decanting and discharging into a river. Although ﬁve weeks’ aeration time was not practical, the key to success was to retain and re-use the sludge layer and then mix it with another batch of sewage and start aeration again (see Figure 1). Repeating the batch cycles and building up the amount of sludge signiﬁcantly reduced the required aeration time – eventually to less than 24 hours. They had created a viable commercial process, using only 50 per cent of the land area required for a trickling ﬁlter (see Figures 2 and 3). The almost magical properties of the ‘activated sludge’ process were attributed by Ardern and Lockett to the retained sludge having become, well, activated. Later work has revealed that the ‘activated sludge’ is in fact a mini eco-system of various naturally occurring bacteria and pro-

Figure 1: The activated sludge process

30

tozoa breaking down and consuming the sewage. The process used was similar in principle to that used in many industrial organic processes, from making cheese to brewing beer. By the 1920s, a continuously operated version was in wide use throughout the industrialised world in large-scale sewage treatment plants. It is a testament to the inventors that the process developed is, in essence, the same one still in use 100 years later. Though several developments have been proposed since the 1950s, why has so little changed? In a nutshell, the mighty microbes used to break down sewage are the same as they have always been. From time to time, various mystery

Figure 2: Stoke Bardolph sewage treatment plant, Nottingham, UK

Figure 3: Post-treatment discharge to the River Trent

31

additives appear on the market; invariably, they either fail to perform, or cost more than any beneﬁt they might bring. Nevertheless, current research work on activated sludge in our laboratory studies a physical and chemical surrogate for activated sludge, known as ‘synthetic sludge’, which is made from non-living components that resemble the real thing but with much less complexity. This allows us to optimise the sludge properties for use in the real process. We are also investigating the socalled membrane bio-reactor (MBR). The MBR combines the sewage bio-degrading properties of activated sludge with a synthetic membrane – those great natural barriers to toxic organic material surrounding the cells of living things. By concentrating the sludge, such a process allows further reduction in the land footprint of sewage treatment, while improving disinfection and quality of the eﬄuent water, making recycling and re-use of domestic and industrial waste-water a real possibility. Thus it is that modern sanitation engineering, which we take so much for granted and yet which is so vital for our health and well-being, was the culmination of clever ingenuity and the harnessing of natural processes. At the heart of the story are microscopic organisms. It is ﬁtting that we should start and ﬁnish in the realm of science ﬁction. It was the great Victorian writer and visionary H. G. Wells who created the apocalyptic vision of a future Martian invasion in War of the Worlds. This nightmare would end only when the giant, spider-like killing machines, with their terrible death rays, were conquered by nothing more than the humble, terrestrial microbe. Perhaps he was more than a little inﬂuenced by the technological progress of his time. Happy Birthday, activated sludge! Nick Hankins Tutor for Engineering and Director of the Oxford Centre for Sustainable Water Engineering References Wallace Reyburn: Flushed with Pride. The Story of Thomas Crapper. Pavilion Books (London, 1989). Jeremy Black: ‘It’s a Dirty Job’, The Chemical Engineer, issue 845, pp 42–3, November 2011.

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Napoleon’s Women: Skirts around a throne1 Clichés have their place in history, so much so that they are intellectualised under the name of tropes. Here’s one from the pile: ‘Behind every great man, there is a woman.’ Perhaps not a universal truism, but one that applies with striking force to Napoleon Bonaparte – a man who was, among other things, First Consul of France, 1799–1804 and Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1804–15, overlord of western and central Europe for a decade and a half, the greatest military commander of his age (at least), and the person whose name is known and loved by brandy drinkers the world over (quite an achievement for one known for his moderation in such things). Napoleon left his mark on the world. He was, without doubt, the greatest individual ﬁgure in the public life of Europe until Hitler, whose name and exploits shade between life and legend, that territory of the mind, that realm of the past, where terms such as ‘celebrity’ and ‘fame’ seem trite. Even in his own lifetime, the almost equally famous German author and cultural arbiter, Goethe, said that, until he actually met him, he thought people like Napoleon existed only in books.2 As the author of a plethora of novels and poems himself, Goethe was the one to know. This is a bravura way of saying, ‘they don’t come greater than Napoleon’, and it must be said, because they don’t. We see him, most frequently, as he wanted to be seen, surrounded by his soldiers and his generals, at the centre of his war machine, the very masculine, ‘macho’ world encapsulated in the title of General John Elting’s study of his army, Swords Around a Throne.3 The great tableaux of his military exploits, by artists such as David and Gros, exalt this world of war, whether in staged glory, as with David’s The oath of the army after the giving of the Eagles, or in the midst of the undisguised gore of Gros’s Napoleon on the Field of Eylau. Take a look at the oﬃcial painting of his coronation in Notre Dame, by David, however, and another context emerges. It is full of women. More than this, they are placed more prominently in the proceedings than anyone else, perhaps even than Napoleon. His then wife, Josephine, is at his knees, waiting to be crowned by him; behind her are Napoleon’s three sisters – Pauline, Caroline and Élisa – along with his sister-in-law, Marie-Julie Clary, the sister of his old ﬂame, Désirée, and Josephine’s daughter from her ﬁrst marriage, Hortense. Hovering above them all, watching events from a balcony at the dead centre of the action, is his mother, Letizia – known simply, but redoubtably, as 33

‘Madame Mère’. Every one of them played a vital, often determining role in his public life, and David – in agreement with Napoleon – made sure they stood centre-stage at what all concerned knew was the apogee of his career, and a seminal moment in modern history. His generals, his ministers, even his brothers, are here made to stand at the edges, almost in shadows, of Napoleon and his women. This was only 1804, however, and there were over ten years of the epic still to come. In that time, two more women would enter Napoleon’s life, and the history of Europe, who would leave a powerful imprint on the man, his epoch and posterity. They were his most serious mistress, the Polish noblewoman Maria Walewska, and Marie-Louise, the daughter of the Habsburg Emperor, Francis I – and Napoleon’s greatest rival for primacy in Europe – who would become Napoleon’s second wife in 1810, but who was only 13 when Napoleon crowned himself and his women in David’s painting. That is quite a total. To embellish the cliché – because we are compelled to by the facts – the greater the man, the more women there are behind him. To wit: a mother, three sisters, a step-daughter, two wives, an old ﬂame, and a mistress who bore him a child. Every single one of them had their part to play in a life that all would agree – as Napoleon quipped more than once himself – would have made a gripping novel. Napoleon’s women marked far more than the stages of his own life and career, however. Each of them incarnates and symbolises signiﬁcant stages in the trajectory of Europe’s fate during the Napoleonic adventure. All of them, taken singly and together, oﬀer a window on their times, and on the world that their man – son, brother, husband, lover – would leave changed for all time. Each of them marks a stage in Napoleon’s times, and that is why we begin at the beginning, but also why the end of the tale does not really end at the end. The lives and legacies of the truly great are not like that. Letizia Buonaparte – for that was how her married name was spelt when she married Napoleon’s father, Carlo, in Corsica in 1764 – was a formidable woman and Napoleon loved her very much. The long received wisdom about their relationship turns on the stereotype of the mother-smothered Latin male. Makers of the anti-Napoleonic ‘black myth’ have seen her as almost an éminence grise (to mix both metaphors and colour schemes) a matriarch hell bent on using her son’s hegemonic power to place all her children on the thrones of Europe.4 Serious scholars have no truck with such a view for, in truth, Madame Mère had no taste for and less knowledge of politics or public life.5 Even so, until re34

cently her warm bond to Napoleon was juxtaposed to the colder, more politically charged relationship with his father.6 In his youth, Napoleon rabidly refused to identify with France, whose regime he loathed as the oppressor of Corsica and a country to which he had been sent by his father, against his will. Feelings of paternal abandonment were mixed with a sense of political treason, as Carlo had deserted the cause of Corsican liberation to serve the French – and despatched his son to a series of military academies to do the same. Through his mother, in contrast, Napoleon clung to his Corsican roots, so retaining his almost maﬁoso sense of clannishness, most of all. Or so the story goes. Recent work by the Australian scholar Philip Dwyer has unearthed a more intriguing, complex – and probably more plausible – relationship, however.7 Letters between Napoleon and Letizia during his early days in the army reveal an often fraught, if loyal, relationship. This neglected correspondence actually helps to chart the sea change in Napoleon’s attitude to the backward, superstitious and vendetta-ridden culture of his homeland, on which he was turning his back, and to that of the France he was increasingly adopting. The world Letizia embodied was now anathema to Napoleon, a way of life to be despised and reformed. This new outlook, coupled with a growing admiration for the French Enlightenment and the core values of the French Revolution, was what would really drive Napoleon’s future policies as head of state, not the embers of a Mediterranean backwoods world, inculcated at Letizia’s knee. The truth of their bond is all the more important to the story, for being complex. As Steven Englund has said in his recent, now seminal biography, there is no doubt that the young Napoleon had a happy Corsican childhood, surrounded by women8 – his paternal aunt and grandmother, and his nurse, Camilla Ilari, who followed the family to its dizzy heights – but there are indications that, as Napoleon shed his cultural heritage, relations with his mother cooled in early adulthood. From the wreck of Corsican feuding and anarchy, which the family ﬂed for good in 1793, Napoleon embraced a very French France, in the arms of Désirée Clary, the daughter of a well-oﬀ and cultured merchant in Marseille, whom he met the following year. The romantic liaison between them came to nothing, but their friendship lasted many years. It was ruptured only when Désirée’s husband, Napoleon’s general Bernadotte – who became the ruler of Sweden in the course of the Napoleonic wars – betrayed his alliance with France. Her sister, Julie, married Napoleon’s older brother, Joseph, and so became ﬁrst Queen 35

of Naples, in 1806, and then Queen of Spain, from 1808 until 1813. Désirée, herself, is the ancestor of the present Swedish royal family, her husband being oﬃcially ‘adopted’ by the childless King of Sweden in 1810. When they met, however, Napoleon’s real fondness and respect for the Clary family, and his abiding aﬀection for Désirée, betoken his growing aﬃnity to the urban, highly civilised France of which they were a part. It was the clearest sign of the beginning of a life-long love aﬀair with a culture and a civilisation, if not quite with a woman. That world of contented, gentle bourgeois families was buﬀeted and battered by the violence and extremism of the French Revolution, but it survived intact, in no small part thanks to the policies of Napoleon himself in his ﬁrst years in power. It would be folly of the highest order to attribute Napoleon’s drive for the restoration of order, the protection of property and the reconciliation of France’s élites to his aﬀection for Désirée, but through her he learned at ﬁrst hand that France and the French amounted to more than the snobbish, preening young nobles whom he so loathed at school and in his ﬁrst years in the army, or of fanatical revolutionaries trying to execute him. Désirée – ‘good natured, plump, short, comely’9 and only 16 – may have been the least serious and the most unprepossessing of Napoleon’s women, but she may also have been the most important, as the cultural intermediary who led him into the heart of la France profonde. The Revolutionary torrent drowned, washed up and stranded many souls. Napoleon was one of them. He escaped the guillotine by a hair’s breadth in the summer of 1794, because of his association with the brother of the Terrorist leader, Maximilien Robespierre. He went on, quickly, to great things, his military skills whisking him into the newly liberated and libertine world of the post-Terror Revolution. France between 1794 and Napoleon’s seizure of power in 1799 was a bonﬁre of the vanities, but one whose champagne-fuelled gaiety was impinged upon by the continuing threat of defeat in foreign war – which would bring a royalist restoration and potential purges worse than those of the Terror – and, even more, by the recent memory of so many close escapes from death, to say nothing of impoverishment and imprisonment at the hands of extremists. It was in the midst of this dizzy world, and also under the shadow of fresh trauma, that Napoleon fell in love with another survivor and battered – if brilliant – orphan of the storm, Marie-Joseph-Rose de Beauharnais, whom Napoleon nicknamed – forevermore – Josephine. If Désirée Clary had introduced Napoleon to 36

the French he would call ‘the masses of granite’, for their stability, Josephine’s desperate, if adventurous, experiences mirrored his own and his family’s convulsed encounters with the great events of the 1790s. They had survived the Revolution quite separately, and were originally from very diﬀerent milieux, but the storm had thrown them together, and together – mostly – they navigated and mastered the good times that followed the fall of Robespierre. Together, they ﬁrst endured history, and then shaped it, with their own hands. Josephine was born into a family of successful minor nobility, whose service to the crown had led them to the colonial Caribbean island of Martinique, where both Josephine and her father had been born; Napoleon, from a far less successful – and possibly fraudulent – family of minor nobility, was the native of an island dragged ﬁghting and wailing into the French imperium. In every sense, Napoleon and Josephine began life as peripheral people. Married to a dissolute noble at an early age, Josephine ﬁrst ﬂed home to Martinique to avoid her husband’s creditors in the last months of the old order, only to ﬂee back to France, in 1790, to escape a slave revolt ignited by the Revolution’s abolition of slavery, that cost most of her family their lives. By 1794, her husband a target of the Terror, she and their two children were in prison in Paris, awaiting an uncertain fate. At the other end of France, in Toulon, Napoleon endured the same ordeal, his own family having ﬂed their island, Corsica, to escape an equally bloody fate. Saved from persecution, Josephine passed, literally and ﬁguratively, through the hands of several ‘protectors’ to become the mistress of the leading politician of the post-Terror era, Paul Barras. Likewise, Napoleon emerged from service and prison in the provinces, to be taken under Barras’s slippery wing, when he put down a royalist rising in Paris in October 1795. Barras was a consummate survivor of the Revolutionary storm, and he brought together – unwittingly, and to his near undoing – two other, more bedraggled survivors. Wishing to discard Josephine, and to control Napoleon, he pushed them together. It is not an understatement – even if it is a cliché – to say that the rest is, indeed, history. History with a capital ‘H’. The relationship that resulted was as intense, volatile and unpredictable as the times that produced its protagonists. It is a legend, in itself, born of ambition, insecurity, and dangerous, but unbounded, horizons. Eight years after he married Josephine in a hurried civil ceremony, before rushing oﬀ to his ﬁrst command that would make him the ruler of Italy, Napoleon crowned her Empress of the French in Notre Dame. They lived 37

less a dream than an epic. The orphans of the storm had mastered the whirlwind, but not without angst. Napoleon could not abandon his ambition, his conquests and, so, his journeying. Josephine, for her part, could not at ﬁrst commit to one man – to one protector, in fact – and her unfaithfulness did much to shape Napoleon’s own hunted, driven personality. Her loyalty only matured with his grip on power. It was not a healthy relationship, but it was energising. More than anything, it mirrored the times. By 1809, when Josephine had not produced an heir to an hegemony that stretched from the Atlantic to the Oder, it became pivotal to the future of Europe. As an era ended, so did one of the greatest romances ever recorded – and it was played out so publicly as to shatter empires and alter worlds. In the years between his marriage to and divorce from Josephine, Napoleon conquered and dominated most of Europe. Josephine became his ﬁrst consort, but his sisters became rulers in their own rights, and they represent, in their turn, the fortunes of a generation. Pauline, Caroline and Élisa, too, left their marks on their times, if in diﬀerent ways. It would not be wrong, but it would still be unfair, to call Napoleon’s sisters ‘bit players’ in the great drama of his life and times. It is true they owed their rise to fame, and some degree of power, solely to him, yet so did France as a whole. Their careers are emblematic less of the women of their times than of the French élites seizing with both hands the new ideology of the ‘career open to talent’, ﬁrst trumpeted by the Revolutionaries, but made real by Napoleon’s conquest and annexation of vast tracts of western Europe. Élisa, the eldest sister, was baptised Maria-Anna. Like Napoleon himself, she was sent to France for her schooling at the age of six, and changed her name during the nine years she spent at a royal girls’ boarding school. She married Pascal-Felix Bacciochi, a minor Corsican ofﬁcer to whom she remained loyal. As he pursued a mediocre military career, she was made Duchess of the tiny Italian state of Lucca, and then Queen of Etruria – Tuscany – in 1808. She took her duties seriously, ﬁrst defending the interests of her subjects, and then those of the French Empire, when the tide turned against Napoleon. She stood her ground in Florence for as long as possible in 1813–14, and spent her last years a virtual prisoner in Trieste, for her loyalty to Napoleon during the 100 Days. Through her public career, Élisa represents the loyal servant of the state, bent on bringing French values to subject peoples, just as in her private life among the imperial family she embodies the experience 38

of hundreds of thousands of Frenchwomen who stood by their soldier husbands as they served the imperial war machine. Her sister, Caroline, emerged as ambitious, treacherous and as courageous as she was capable. She was the wife of Napoleon’s colourful cavalry commander, Joachim Murat, and they became the King and Queen of Naples, when Napoleon’s elder brother, Joseph, was transferred to the crown of Spain (which they had hoped would fall to them) in 1808. Caroline craved power and responsibility, of which Napoleon thought her capable but which Murat denied her – until he was called away to ﬁght in the cataclysmic Russian campaign of 1812. During his absence, Caroline showed a genuine aptitude for government, as earlier she had shown real courage, in leading the defence of the city of Naples against a British naval attack in 1809, when she drove along the bay in an open carriage during the bombardments. Her ﬁrst thought was always for her throne, however, whoever the opponent. She helped turn Murat to treason in 1814, even prepared to mislead and thwart the ever loyal Élisa in Florence, who trusted Caroline until it was too late. When her husband belatedly returned to Napoleon’s side, in 1815, she refused. Initially, her ruthless diplomacy preserved the kingdom in Murat’s hands, but she fell with him, despite her entreaties, and ended in exile, with Élisa. Pauline was the spoilt child of the family, a beauty, something of a lightweight in the world of the Bonapartes, whom Napoleon nicknamed in despair ‘Our Lady of the Fripperies’. Indeed, she became something close to the ‘poster girl’ of the First Empire, through the risqué portrait she modelled for by the great Italian artist of the age, Canova. Yet this is not the whole story. Her ﬁrst husband was General Leclerc, entrusted by Napoleon with suppressing the great slave revolt on Haiti in 1803. Pauline shared the dangers of the campaign, saw her husband killed, and organised and sustained the French women and children caught up in the fury, taking a lead in the evacuation. After his death, however, she suﬀered a breakdown, while her good looks drew the attentions of ambitious, usually nefarious, suitors. Despite Napoleon’s eﬀorts, one of them succeeded, a Roman aristocrat of high birth, low morals and no scruples, Camillo Borghese. Pauline spent most of her time at Court, avoiding him, yet in her brief sojourn as Napoleon’s representative in the Italian city of Turin – former and future capital of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Savoy – her charm and grace managed to win over the prominent Cavour family to Napoleon. She became godmother to Camille de Cavour, who would go on to become the ﬁrst prime minister of 39

a united Italy, and through his parents’ association with the regime, inculcated its institutions and values among the new country’s ruling élites. Even spoilt, ﬂighty Pauline had her part to play in what Stuart Woolf has called ‘Napoleon’s Integration of Europe’.10 Taken together, Napoleon’s three sisters’ separate experiences of the era incarnate three diverse faces of the empire: Élisa served it; Caroline was empowered by it to the point of egomania; Pauline, in the utterly diﬀerent outcomes of her two marriages, was its gilded victim. Napoleon’s sisters were the instruments of subjugation and empirebuilding, yet on St Helena, while dictating his memoirs, he also liked to claim he was a liberator, the harbinger of free nations in a Europe enslaved by dynastic empires. The best – probably the only – evidence for these assertions was his revival of Poland, which had been ruthlessly partitioned three times in the eighteenth century by Russia, Austria and Prussia, until it ﬁnally disappeared in 1795. Napoleon created the ‘Grand Duchy of Warsaw’ in 1807, carved out of the Prussian parts of Poland, partially restoring Polish independence. If even half the legend is true, this was inﬂuenced – some say driven – by his relationship with a Polish noblewomen, Maria Walewska, which began in 1807. Still married to a Polish noble over twice her age when she met Napoleon, Maria was at ﬁrst scandalised and frightened by Napoleon’s invitations, but there emerged a genuine loyalty to each other that lasted long after their brief relationship, which ended in 1808. By 1810, Maria had come to Paris where Napoleon looked after her; she went to his side at Fontainebleau during the last, dark hours of 1814, and even visited him on Elba, possibly playing an important part in persuading Napoleon into the doomed adventure of the 100 Days. Her ferocious loyalty was even evident in her second marriage – in 1816, ‘after the fall’ – to one of Napoleon’s generals, who would become a Marshal under Napoleon III. Her devotion mirrored that of the Polish lancers at Waterloo who were the last to surrender, and who escorted Napoleon from the ﬁeld. Maria Walewska did something else, as well. She bore Napoleon a son, thus proving to him – after 12 childless years with Josephine – that he was not impotent, thus precipitating the divorce of 1809, and Napoleon’s remarriage to Marie-Louise, the daughter of the Habsburg Emperor, Francis I. Marie-Louise embodies the apogee of Napoleonic power and triumphalism. She was, quite simply, the greatest ‘trophy bride’ in the history of modern Europe. The union was forced on her father, after the crush40

ing military defeat of 1809, just as the need for an undisputed heir had been made clear by the extent of Napoleon’s conquests at that time. Yet, Marie-Louise proved much more than that. She was the scion of many strong, intelligent Habsburg women – her grandmother, the formidable empress Maria-Theresa and her aunt, the brave but ill-starred Marie-Antoinette chief among them. Marie-Louise displayed all their acumen and resilience in later life, but she also represented and partook of something quite new. Still in her teens when she became the second Empress of the French, Marie-Louise was quickly, if quietly, brought into the councils of state by Napoleon, to prepare her to act as regent for their son, Napoleon-Francis, ‘the King of Rome’, should anything befall the Emperor, something that became even more urgent after the Russian campaign. Marie-Louise was part of a renewal going on within the imperial corridors of power in the last years of the empire; she encapsulated a shift Napoleon was working on, to move authority away from the older generation of ex-revolutionaries and royalists, towards younger men – and one woman – who had been shaped by his rule. After Napoleon’s fall, her father granted her the small Italian duchy of Parma, where she displayed all the administrative and reforming drive Napoleon had inculcated in her. Under her rule, from 1814 to her death in 1847, Parma enjoyed economic prosperity, a system of administration that was Napoleon’s in miniature, and one of the ﬁnest educational systems in Europe, with literacy rates more in line with those of northern Europe than her Italian neighbours. Marie-Louise remains an adored ﬁgure in her adopted city-state to this day. There was something else, however, a ‘non-event’, as it were, of tragic proportions, ﬁtting of the novel that was, indeed, Napoleon’s adventure. Like so many of the other women in his life, Marie-Louise remained ferociously loyal to Napoleon in the desperate days of 1814, when the Allies had taken Paris, imploring Napoleon to ﬁght on, promising she would keep their son safe from her own father. Intriguing for peace and to save his own skin, Napoleon’s brother Joseph had the Polish courier she sent to Napoleon – to heap pathos on tragedy – killed. With contact ﬁnally broken, Napoleon lost heart, thought of her safety and that of his son, and advised her to go to the Allies.11 He abdicated after an attempted suicide. Both went to their very separate graves, ignorant of the love and loyalty they shared for each other to the end. Like her aunt before her, it was the Habsburg ‘trophy bride’ who proved most ready to risk all for the destiny of France. 41

There is one last, remarkable woman to reckon with in Napoleon’s life. Napoleon’s favourite brother was Louis, nine years his junior. Napoleon had looked after him for most of his life, after their father’s early death, and hoped he had made something of him. He was wrong. An inept and yet unruly King of Holland, between 1805 and 1810, Louis was actually ﬁred as ruler by Napoleon, and ﬂed to Prague – in enemy territory – a bundle of nerves. Louis merits the sobriquet ‘the bumbling Bonaparte’. Until then, however, Napoleon placed great faith in him, and was delighted to engineer his marriage to his favourite person in the whole world, Hortense, Josephine’s daughter by her ﬁrst husband. His misplaced faith in Louis was amply compensated for by the remarkable Hortense. His admiration – if also his exasperation – for her grew all the more because she came to loathe her husband for the same reasons as Napoleon. Seductive, intelligent and very well educated, she was too much for Louis, but wonderful company for her stepfather, as well as being a skilled painter. When Louis ﬂed to Bohemia, she returned to Paris, and even the divorce of her mother did not shatter her close relations with Napoleon, who often conﬁded in her. The great impression she made on Tsar Alexander in 1814 did much to protect her mother’s position, but Hortense rallied to Napoleon in the 100 Days, and paid for it with years of exile. To ask, ‘why end with Hortense?’ is a fair question. It turns on the greatest of ironies. Napoleon’s divorce of her mother was earth shattering, not only on the personal level in ending a stormy if heart-felt love aﬀair that dwarfs anything ﬁction could produce, but in its political fall-out. Napoleon was desperate for an heir, so much so that he exacerbated an already fraught relationship with the Pope, which ended in his own excommunication and Rome’s refusal to recognise his new marriage to Marie-Louise or the legitimacy of their son. The divorce also set Napoleon free to ensure that his heir could not be branded the parvenu usurper he knew himself to be. He was ﬁnally able to humiliate his most determined rival for the leadership of continental Europe. All occasioned by the need for an heir. Thus, Josephine – always treated well after the divorce – was left behind, she whose ﬁckle love for him had spurred Napoleon on to prove and console himself, so many times. It was Hortense and the unlikely Louis who provided the true heir. Napoleon’s son, Napoleon II, died in Austrian hands in odd – if perhaps not quite sinister – circumstances in 1832. Hortense’s son, Louis-Napoleon, went on to become Napoleon III and found the Second Empire, 42

in 1851, having ﬁrst been President of the Second French Republic; she nurtured him in long exile. More than this, however, through her son and his family, the supposedly barren genes of Josephine – Beauharnais, not Habsburg – entered almost all the royal houses of Europe. By instinct, rather than design, Napoleon had rightly discerned who, among all the amazing skirts around this throne, was the most remarkable of all. Or, perhaps, it was destiny that did so, what he liked to call his ‘star’. That was Hortense, without a doubt. Michael Broers Fellow and Tutor in Modern History; Professor of Western European History 1 The title is given with apologies to Alan Forrest’s Napoleon’s Men. The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (London, 2002) and J. R. Elting’s Swords Around a Throne: Napoleon’s Grande Armée (New York, 1988), and with fully intended irony! 2 Gustave Stresemann, Goethe et Napoléon (Paris, 1929). 3 Elting, Swords Around a Throne, passim. 4 Jean Tulard, L’anti-Napoléon; la légende noire de l’Empereur (Paris, 1964). 5 Gilbert Martineau, Madame Mère (Paris, 1978) is fairly typical. 6 See, especially, Dorothy Carrington, Napoleon and his Parents. 7 This research is embodied in Dr Dwyer’s forthcoming ﬁrst volume of his life of Napoleon, to be published by Bloomsbury Press. 8 Steven Englund, Napoleon. A political life (New York, 2004) p. 13. 9 Englund, Napoleon, p. 85. 10 Stuart Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (London, 1991). 11 Jean Tulard, Napoleon II (Paris, 1992).

43

Senior Members’ Personal and Career News (Women members are listed by their surnames at the time of entry to LMH; married names, if used, are placed in brackets afterwards). 1941 MARY MORGAN (Kirk) and her husband are now permanently in Eng-

land after 40 years in France, although they always kept a house in England and, after her husband’s retirement, spent six months in each country every year. They are feeling their age, at 89 years, but enjoying life through their grandchildren. They were shocked and saddened to lose their elder son, David, who died in his sleep from an aneurism in August 2010. 1943 MARY GRAHAM (Holtby) writes that her brother, John (aka Araucaria of

The Guardian) celebrated his 90th birthday this year – an occasion for numerous family and crossword-oriented parties, and an appearance on Desert Island Discs (unexpectedly including her Song of Mary). 1944 JOAN DRAPER (Benner) broke her right femur in the autumn of 2010.

It needed a rather complicated repair but, with the aid of physiotherapy, she is now walking with a single stick. The surgeon told her they’d only been doing this operation for about 20 years. She remembers that when she was young this sort of injury left people bedridden, often for life, so she is very thankful. JOAN MASON-MARTIN writes that arthritis and balance problems restrict her mobility but she enjoyed two holidays in 2011, including an individually guided retreat at Glenfall House near Cheltenham. 1947 JANET SHIRLEY (Barlow) writes that, after a lifetime of happily translat-

ing other people’s work, she is delighted to be publishing ﬁction of her own. The Road to Stonehenge deals with the problems of a child who thinks she lives in the Stone Age and ﬁnds that the Bronze Age is taking over. Harry Bone-Thief is set in another time of conﬂict: 1538, in Canterbury, when Henry VIII destroys both Becket’s tomb and Canterbury’s economic prosperity. The next book is coming along gently. 44

1948 CHARLOTTE WARE (Johnston) and her husband, Arthur, celebrated

their diamond wedding anniversary in September. The party included three of the original wedding guests, one of whom was an LMH contemporary, Sylvia Lightburne (1950), and 17 family members – of whom 12 were great-grandchildren, who stole the show, of course. The groom’s present to the bride was a laptop so she hopes soon to graduate from spider solitare to the internet and Skype. 1952 BARBARA BUCKNALL has, since 1998, been very interested in contrib-

uting to a newsletter on children’s fantasy issued in Minneapolis. She is currently working on a teen fantasy novel called Janet Birthright: The Story of a Bad Quaker. She became a Quaker in Illinois in the 1960s and has always been somewhat fantastical. She hopes to have an art show in March 2012. ANTONIA McANDREW (Southern) is currently working on a book due out in 2013: House Divided: Christianity in England 1526–1829. JENNIFER WARREN (Cargill Thompson) writes that in a ceremony in the Sheldonian on 23 September 2011 she was awarded a DLitt by Oxford on account of her research into the numismatics and ancient history of the cities of the Peloponnese in Greece between the early ﬁfth century BC and the battle of Actium. She is grateful for the Principal’s generous support. 1958 LISA BURNSIDE (Parkinson) continues to work as a family mediator,

consultant and trainer. In the past year she has enjoyed the enormous privilege and fun of invitations to give conference papers and workshops in many European countries, from Portugal and Finland to the Ukraine. Another highlight was a trip to Nepal (a holiday, not work) to visit the very impressive residential care home for severely disabled children in Kathmandu (www.nepalichildrenstrust.com) and projects run by Practical Action, plus some exciting bird watching and rhino sighting. (Tigers were not visible – probably just as well.) FIONA MacCARTHY is now President of the 20th Century Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 1960 VIRGE TAUL (James) and MAUREEN WARE (Cruickshank) are very

grateful to their year group for contributing so generously to raising 45

£10,000 for the College. The fund-raising was a very enjoyable task which brought them into contact with so many members of their year. The plaque marking this year-group gift is now in place on the Pipe Partridge building. 1961 JOANNA HARE (Breyer) continues to work as a psychologist, at the

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, with survivors of childhood cancer. She has ﬁve grandchildren – the youngest are twins, now 18 months old. She has gained a new respect for parents who have raised twins. She thoroughly enjoyed reconnecting with old friends at the Gaudy weekend, which was beautifully organised. 1962 MARY McKEONE is on a six-month sabbatical, living in a ﬂat in a new com-

munity, and is completing a book on the spirituality of young people. 1963 PAM BUSBY (de Wit) is returning to England in 2012 after eight years

living in the Netherlands. She has enjoyed learning a new language, discovering a surprisingly diﬀerent culture, and being part of an English-speaking international congregation in the Anglican Church in Utrecht, where her husband John has been Chaplain. Prior to this they spent 25 years in various diﬀerent parishes in Birmingham. At Birmingham University, Pam worked as an extramural tutor, and built up a lively programme in Old and Middle English. This experience in adult education also led to a full-time job for the Diocese of Birmingham, where she worked for ten years as diocesan adviser for lay education and training. John’s retirement this year marks the start of a new phase for them both. Pam is looking forward to a new home in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, and closer contact with English family and friends – and a new pattern of life unfolding. MARY TURNER (Hamer) writes that when she chose to write up her latest research project in the form of ﬁction she was plunging into uncharted waters. Happily her novel, Kipling and Trix, based on the lives of Rudyard Kipling and his sister has been awarded the Virginia Prize and will be published by Aurora in 2012. 1964 WENDY DOBSON (Warr) writes that her grandson, Tobias Joseph, was

born in Hong Kong, in November 2011, to her son Alastair and his wife Elizabeth. 46

1965 ANNETTE DYER (Haworth) writes that, with a small charity, she is set-

ting up a programme hoping to ﬁnd ways that moderate-sized museums can help visitors with communication disabilities to have enjoyable (and educational) visits, interacting through smart-phones and tablets such as iPads. She adds that it would be great to hear from others with an interest in museums and disability (see www.imuse.org.uk). She is also trying to put her MSc in Voluntary Sector Management to good use as Chair of Reading Voluntary Action. She is not sure what happened to the pure mathematics absorbed while at LMH! 1966 ELIZABETH BECKER (Carmichael) retired in September 2011 from be-

ing the Chaplain, Fellow and Tutor in Theology at St John’s College and took up an Emeritus Research Fellowship. She continues to convene the Oxford Network of Peace Studies (OxPeace) and to direct the St Theosevia Centre for Christian Spirituality. She is researching the South African National Peace Accord 1991–4. 1969 PENNY BURDEN (Boumelha) has, since January 2009, been Deputy

Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at the Victoria University of Wellington. After more than 20 years in Australia, she has enjoyed moving to New Zealand and has found the change of university and policy environment very stimulating. Her daughter, Kate, married in 2010 and is a teacher in South Australia. 1970 MIRANDA ALDHOUSE (Aldhouse-Green) delivered the eighth biennial

endowed lecture, ‘The Professor John Mulvaney Lecture’, at the Australian National University, Canberra, in June 2011. She also lectured to the Classical Association of Victoria in Melbourne. 1971 PAULA GRAYSON writes that Bell Consultancy is still keeping her busy,

advising small and medium enterprises on contractual terms and avoiding diﬃcult employment issues. Her non-executive director role for the East of England Ambulance Service (EEAST) included the challenge of a Strategic Health Authority ‘board to board’ (a sustained panel interview test of the capability of the members of the EEAST Board through questions and answers), along their Foundation Trust route. As Vice Chairman of Central Bedfordshire College, she was delighted when 47

staﬀ rose to the challenge of an unexpectedly early Ofsted visit. They have two entrepreneurial capital projects starting this year. She adds that the class of 1971 have had a very social year – Cathy Kilroy was over from New Zealand in March, Alison Coulthard visited from Norway in July, and Janis Baines visited from Australia on her way to a conference in Italy. Many of them met up at a party in November, starting with ﬁreworks, and LMH kindly hosted their 40th anniversary lunch on 3 July. They were delighted by excellent food, thoughtful staﬀ, beautiful gardens and scary photographs of their distant selves. Catching up with everyone’s news was fascinating: books, children, travel and work. GILLIAN HIGGINS (Francis) is Senior Partner in a general practice and is living in the Wirral. She was recently elected Chair of Wirral NHS Alliance Commissioning Consortium and is committed to the development of Clinical Commissioning to preserve the future of the NHS and provide high-quality care for patients. MARGARET MALLABAND (Coombe) writes that she ﬁnally completed her DPhil in medieval history in 2011 and has contracted with Oxford University Press to produce the text and translation of Reginald of Durham’s Life of St Goderic of Finchale. Exactly 40 years after her ﬁrst arrival, she returned to LMH this autumn as a Research Fellow. 1972 NICKY HARPER (Bull) completed a two-year MLitt degree in 2011, as a

‘distance’ postgraduate student at St Andrew’s University. Having last completed a degree in 1989, she says it was quite a challenge returning to formal study and a complete change of subject after a career in science. The degree – in ‘Bible and the Contemporary World’ – allowed her to spend time in another lovely university and to make new friends from all over the world. SUSAN REYNOLDS (Halstead) writes that 2011 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Czech poet Karel Jaromir Erben, marked by a special gathering in his birthplace of Miletin, at which she was a guest as the ﬁrst translator of a complete version of his Kytice into English. She also presented papers at a conference in Exeter marking the 200th anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist, and at others in Oxford and Cambridge. In November she helped to organize a European Crime Fiction study day at the British Library (BL), and was involved in the BL’s exhibition, ‘Out of this World: Science ﬁction, but not as you know it’, featuring an original model of the robots from Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. brought over from the Czech Republic. On New Year’s Eve 2010 her son, Martin, now a pilot based in Chicago, was married in 48

Oxford to a former student of hers, Kristen Walker, whom he met while she was studying on the Oxford Overseas Study Course (OOSC). She adds that she will greatly miss teaching for OOSC, where Jacquie Rawes (1976) is also a tutor, when it closes in 2012. 1973 LYNNE JONES has just completed a Fellowship year at the Radcliﬀe In-

stitute for Advanced Study, Harvard, and is working on her professional memoir: Outside the Asylum: a psychiatrist’s memoir of madness, war and disaster. 1974 ALISON GOMM put on a comedy sketch show, Getting Away With It, writ-

ten and performed by herself and her comedy partner, Helen Mosby, in LMH’s Simpkins Lee theatre at the end of February. They will perform again at Oxfringe 2012 in June. BEVERLY LANG was appointed a High Court Judge in October 2011 and, in consequence, was also appointed a DBE by the Queen. She is the third LMH graduate to be appointed to the High Court Bench, and by coincidence, she is now working next door to Elizabeth Slade (1968), appointed in 2008. NADIA WOLOSHYN (Crandall) writes that, as an investor in early-stage and start-up businesses, she has taken up an equity position in the ‘New College of the Humanities’ where she is also on the advisory board. In September 2011, her younger son, James, joined his brother, Philip, at Columbia College, New York. 1975 JOANNE FOAKES left the Foreign and Commonwealth Oﬃce (where

she had been a Legal Counsellor) at the end of 2008 and is now an Associate Fellow with the International Law Programme at Chatham House. She is currently working on a book for Oxford University Press on the position of heads of state and other senior oﬃcers under international law. 1976 JACQUI CHIRGWIN (Kertes) has been a consultant medical oncologist

in Melbourne, Australia, since 1990. She specialises in breast cancer with a particular interest in clinical trials as she is chair of several, including some international trials. She is also Chair of the Board of Directors of Australia New Zealand Breast Cancer Trials Group. 49

HILARY FAULL (Cotton) writes that, in July 2012, the General Synod of

the Church of England is expected to take the ﬁnal vote on whether to allow women to be bishops. Since it is the Church of England, this is not straightforward: provisions will be made for those who will not accept female bishops, and the debates about how far those provisions should go will no doubt continue right up to the vote. She would be delighted to hear from any who have an interest: contact her via the WATCH website www.womenandthechurch.org JUDY RODD (Ford) continues in her job as Manager of the North West Stroke Research Network. She also continues to be a Methodist Local Preacher and is secretary to the Parochial Church Council of the parish church in the small village where she lives. They have two weddings coming up in the family during 2011: her son, David, is marrying a fellow Hertford graduate, and her older daughter, Elizabeth, is marrying a colleague from EDF Energy, where she now has a permanent job as a nuclear safety engineer. Her younger daughter is studying mathematics at Bath University. 1979 KAREN BETTESWORTH (Down) is delighted to report that, in October

2011, her elder daughter, Amy, took up her place at Queen’s College to read classics. She is now looking forward to spending more time in Oxford again, but this time without the essays and lectures to contend with. SARAH KING is Managing Director of The Futures Company, a business which grew out of the merger of The Henley Centre with 2 others here and in the US. The Futures Company is a leading futures and foresight consultancy serving clients across the world, with strategic futures work, trends, innovation and research. She has been there since joining The Henley Centre in 2005. She lives in London with her husband, documentary maker Patrick Forbes, and their children, Felix (17), Noah (15) and Viola (12). 1980 PENINAH THOMSON was appointed Chief Executive of The Mentor-

ing Foundation, a not-for-proﬁt company limited by guarantee, in October 2012. The Mentoring Foundation owns and manages the FTSE 100 Cross-company Mentoring Programme, in which more than 50 FTSE-100 Chairmen and Chief Executives, and leaders from the public sector, mentor female senior executives at just below board level from another company, to assist them in becoming credible candidates for executive and non-executive board positions. 50

1981 SAAD SALAMAN HYDER was appointed to the post of Unit Manager,

Portfolio Management & Business Analytics for CJBG (Corporate Investment Banking Group), Mashreq Bank, Dubai, UAE in 2011. 1982 GRAHAM PRINCE was awarded the London Diploma in psychosexual

and relationship counselling and is currently working as a sex therapist and relationship counsellor in south-west England. CLARE SHOULTS was appointed Consultant in Acute and Respiratory Medicine and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Medical Education at St George’s Hospital and Medical School, Tooting, from 1 January 2010. In the medical school she is responsible for the 300 students in the ﬁrst clinical year of the medical course at St George’s and she works as a practising acute physician. She returned to work part time in November 2011 after maternity leave. 1986 JOHN GRAHAM-CUMMING ran a campaign in 2009 to petition the

British government to apologise for the treatment of the code breaker and mathematician Alan Turing. The government issued a formal apology. He is currently working towards building Charles Babbage’s analytical engine (the world’s ﬁrst computer). CHRIS HODGES has recently returned from his overseas posting as head of catering (Royal Artillery) at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, with many stories and several great local recipes! It was a diﬃcult and rewarding experience. Chris and his partner are now living a quieter life by the sea in Brighton, pleased to be spending more time on shellﬁsh than shellﬁre! 1987 SOPHIA COLLIEU (Burton) has been living in the USA since 1999. Af-

ter eight glorious years living in California, she moved with her family to Rhode Island four years ago. She is currently in graduate school working on a Master of Social Work degree and loving it. AMANDA SPICE writes that, after 20 years in Reading, in June 2010 they moved house to Hampshire with her work. In the few months before the move, they had a major leak under a concrete ﬂoor in their old house, and spent ages drying it out. Since moving, they’ve had a continuous stream of building works to improve the new house. Her husband, Dave, resigned in January 2009 to look after their young family. She resigned in July 2011, so that they could all go travelling 51

before their children start school. They are mainly backpacking, and the children (aged 2 and 3) practised carrying all their clothes in their rucksacks. Amanda has found that she has a particular knack for balloon modelling, so her rucksack also included plenty of balloons and a pump. They set oﬀ in mid-October 2011 for two months in Chile and Brazil, again in mid-January 2012 for three months in New Zealand and South Korea, and will ﬁnish with one and a half months in Turkey and a month in western Europe or camping around the UK. 1989 KIRSTEEN WILLIAMS (Robson) continues to work for Usbourne

Publishing and in March 2011 was promoted to Editorial Director (Wolverhampton). In May 2011, she married Duncan Robson and became stepmother to Sophie (11) and Tom (9). In her spare time she still enjoys singing with Armonico Consort, whose most recent CD, Naked Byrd 2, was well-received in Gramophone. 1990 XANTHE BEVIS (Messenger) obtained a postgraduate Diploma in Pub-

lic Health from Oxford Brookes University in 2011. 1991 KARL HOLMES married Laura Hontoria in 2008 in San Sebastian,

Spain. They live in Hampstead, North London, with their two sons, Mateo Holmes Hontoria (born February 2011) and Sebastian Holmes Hontoria (born March 2009). He and Laura met in Boston, where they were both studying for their MBAs at Harvard Business School (class of 2003). He now works for News Corporation, as Finance Director for Europe and Asia, overseeing the ﬁnancial well-being of their TV and newspaper businesses in the UK, Italy, Germany, the Middle East and India. 1993 JULIETTE PRODHAN is working with the UK Department for Inter-

national Development (DFID) and is currently based in Khartoum, Sudan. 1995 GRANT TAPSELL married Catherine Wright on 4 September 2011 in

Oxford. At the start of the following month he succeeded Clive Holmes as Fellow and Tutor in History at LMH. 52

1997 PAUL MILLER received his PhD in International Relations from George-

town University in August 2010 and in the same month accepted a post as Assistant Professor at the National Defense University. HELEN RADICE (Leitner) followed LMH with postgraduate study at the Royal College of Music and a job as principal harp for the opera house in Passau, Germany. She now works for the French instrument makers, Les Harpes Camac, developing their artist support and sponsorship activities. 2002 JONATHAN WAGSTAFF has been awarded a scholarship to study opera

(Master of Music) at the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, USA, under baritone John Shirley-Quirk, from 2011 until 2013. 2005 LAURA LAZZARI writes that since August 2011 she has been an Assist-

ant Professor and Italian coordinator at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Franklin College, Switzerland. Prior to joining Franklin College she worked as a graduate assistant in Italian literature at the University of Lausanne (2002–8), where she completed her PhD (2009), and as a Lecturer at the University of Fribourg (2009–11) where she was responsible for the Italian language courses and exams for the Bachelor BA_SI ILS, an undergraduate programme in Italian as a foreign language. 2007 BIANCA SUMMONS (Pellet) got married (on the same day as the Royal

Wedding) to Jean-Marc Pellet, a graduate of master’s programmes at Bath and at EMLYON. They met in 2004 when they were both at Exeter University (he on the Erasmus programme, she as an undergraduate reading Classics and English). They kept up a long-distance relationship for more than three years while he studied in France and she studied in Oxford (MSt General Linguistics), before she moved to France in 2008 to be with him and work at an international school in Paris as a part-time English teacher, using the rest of her time to write, translate and proofread.

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Marriages (These are listed with the Member’s name ﬁrst, but where both husband and wife are Members the alphabetical order of their surnames is used.) CHIRGWIN – KERTES. On 10 November 1990, Jacqueline Chirgwin (1976)

to Paul Kertes DAVISON – DOBSON. On 23 December 2010, Louise Davison (2000) to Mark

Dobson GOUGH – McWILLIAM. On 21 October 2010, Thalia Gough (1959) to Sir

Michael McWilliam KCMG HORROCKS – FOREMAN. On 29 October 2011, Joanna Horrocks (Smart

1977) to Stephen Foreman LINDSTEN – HENDERSON. On 22 October 2011, Charlotte Lindsten (1999)

to Duncan Henderson MARLIN – SCHINTGEN. On 16 July 2005, Christine Marlin (1992) to Michael

Schintgen RADICE – LEITNER. On 21 October 2010, Helen Radice (1997) to Harry

Leitner ROGERS – ROBSON. On 7 May 2011, Kirsteen Rogers (Williams 1989) to

Duncan Robson SHOULTS – TAYLOR. On 16 September 2006, Clare Shoults (1992) to Stephen

Taylor SUMMONS – PELLET. On 29 April 2011, Bianca Summons (2007) to Jean-

Marc Pellet SWIRE – WISEMAN. On 22 March 2009, Katharine Swire (1999) to Jonathan

Wiseman (1999) TAPSELL – WRIGHT. On 4 September 2011, Grant Tapsell (1995) to Catherine

Wright TRUETT – BONG. On 6 February 2010, Emma Truett (1996) to Albert Bong TULLOCH – TABERNER. On 19 September 2009, Nick Tulloch (1992) to

Sarah Taberner WONG – HEENEMAN. On 25 September 2010, Jun Wong (1996) to Alicia

Heeneman

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Births (These are listed by the preferred surname of the Member; where both parents are Members and diﬀerent surnames used, the surnames are in alphabetical order.) BILES. On 18 June 2010, to Neil (1994) and Kristen (Thorner 1994) a daugh-

ter (2d) BONG. On 16 May 2011, to Emma (Truett 1996) a daughter (1d) BORTHWICK. On 7 May 2010, to Amanda (Tipper 1996) a son (1s) HILES. On 10 August 2011, to Hannah (Crush 1997) a son (1s) JONES. On 26 April 2011, to Michael (1994) a daughter (1d) KERTES. On 1 May 1992 and 27 February 1996, to Jacquie (Chirgwin 1990)

two daughters (2d) LEITNER. On 18 July 2011, to Helen (Radice 1997), a daughter (1d) MACGREGOR. On 19 January 2011, to Karen (Dore 1988) a son (2s 1d) MESSENGER. On 2 February 2010, to Xanthe (Bevis 1990) a son (1d 2s) MILLER. On 2 April 2009 and 21 April 2010, to Paul (1997) two daughters

(2d) RANSOM. In June 2011, to Christina (Edwards 1998) a daughter (1d) SCHINTGEN. On November 1 2009, to Christine (Marlin 1992) a son (1s) SHOULTS. On 9 October 2010, to Clare (1992) a son (1s) SPICE. On 5 May 2009, to Amanda (1987) a daughter (2d) STANLEY. On 7 December 2011, to Nicole (1998) a daughter (1d) TULLOCH. On 2 September 2011, to Nick (1992) a son (1s) WEBSTER. On 9 July 2011, to Lisa (Mason 1998) a daughter (1s, 1d) WISEMAN. On 26 March 2011, to Jonathan (1999) and Katharine (Swire

1999) a son (1s)

Deaths ANDERSON. On 25 September 2010, Mary Irene (1938), aged about 90 (see

Obituaries) ADAMSON. On 30 October 2011, Shirley Margaret (Glover 1951), aged 79 BAILEY. On 7 July 2011, John (LMH Treasurer, 1998–2002), aged 79 (see

Obituaries) BAKER. In November 2008, Yvonne Ethel Margaret (Buckoke 1939), aged 88 BAYLIS. On 12 March 2012, Ann Christian Roberta (Robson 1957), aged 74 CADDY. On 22 January 2012, Isabel Howson (Burn 1941), aged 88. CROWE. On 9 June 2011, Christiana Ann (Charlesworth 1943), aged 85

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DANIEL. On 1 January 2012, Elizabeth Sidney (Pepys 1934), aged 97 DRUMMOND. On 13 September 2011, Cecily Vivien (Pollock 1949), aged 80 FARIS. On 22 July 2011, Mary (Campbell 1941), aged 91 (see Obituaries) FORT. On 19 January 2012, Jean (Rae 1933), aged 97 GLYN. In January 2012, Marna (Buckatsch 1939), aged 92 (see Obituaries) HAWTHORN. On 17 September 2011, Kathleen (Harper 1937), aged 93 HETHERINGTON. On 20 April 2011, Tim (1989), aged 40 (see Obituaries) HOPE-WALLACE. On 23 October 2011, Jacqueline (1928), aged 102 HOWARD. On 28 May 2011, Carol (Gaynor 1956), aged 73 (see Obituaries) HUNT. On 13 October 2011, Hilda Mary (1931), aged 99 (see Obituaries) KAYE. On 7 January 2012, Enid (1948), aged 82 KEAN. On 5 August 2011, Patricia Margaret (1941, Fellow and Tutor, 1949–

80), aged 88 (see Obituaries) LANG BROWN. On 23 May 2011, Elisabeth Marjorie (Morrison 1953), aged 77 LANGTON. On 3 September 2011, Ina Rosemary (1931), aged 99 LEVISON. On 12 September 2011, Mary Irene (Lusk 1941), aged 88 LLEWELYN DAVIES. On 15 March 2011, Henrietta Lissadell, aged 56; daugh-

ter of the late Sylvia (Jane) Llewelyn Davies (1942) (see Obituaries) MacIVER. On 15 June 2011, Kathleen (1940), aged 90 MILLS. On 28 May 2011, Barbara (Warnock 1959), aged 70 (see Obituaries) MONAHAN. On 10 March 2011, Ruth (1941), aged 87 MURPHY. On 29 July 2011, April Mary Elizabeth Margaret (Fletcher 1940),

aged 90 PACK. On 24 October 2010, Constance Mary (Gillam 1941), aged 88 (see

Obituaries) PRICE. On 14 June 2011, Simon (Fellow, 1981–2008), aged 56 (see Obituaries) REID. On 22 March 2011, Elizabeth Margaret Dominique (Avery 1974), aged 55 SELLERS. On 5 January 2012, Angela (Jukes 1941), aged 89 (see Obituaries) SIDNEY. On 14 April 2011, Elizabeth (Mudford 1942), aged 87 SLESSENGER. On 28 February 2012, Emma (1977), aged 53 (there will be an

obituary in next year’s Brown Book) VIDAL-HALL. On 22 September 2011, Angèle (1935), aged 95 (there will be an

obituary in next year’s Brown Book) WHITE. On 17 August 2011, Jacqueline (Phillips 1952), aged 77 WHITE. Early in 2012, Joan Harcourt (Sutton 1935), aged 95 WHITEHEAD. On 17 January 2012, Margaret (1946) aged 90 WILLIAMS. On 18 April 2011, Dorothy (Heaton 1951), aged 79 KAYE. On 8 February 2012, Bill, husband of Anne (Holland 1951) KIRK. On 15 August 2010, David Andrew, son of Mary (Morgan 1941)

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Senior Members’ Publications MIRANDA ALDHOUSE-GREEN (1970). Review of B. W. Cunliffe Druids, a Very

Short Introduction in Pomegranate, 2011; ‘Witchcraft and Deep Time – a debate at Harvard’ with Stephen Mitchell et al. in Antiquity, 84, 864–78, 2011. DIANA ATHILL (1936). Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend (Granta, 2011) (see Reviews). JEANNETTE BEER (Scott 1956). ‘Julius Caesar in Paris: Li Fet des Romains’ in Romance Philology, 65, 2011. JOAN BENNER (Draper 1944). Poetry in Assent magazine, 65(1) (December 2011). VANORA BENNETT (1981). The People’s Queen (Harper, 2011) (see Reviews). JANE BLISS (1998). ‘Cher Alme’: texts of Anglo-Norman Piety edited by Tony Hunt, translated by Jane Bliss, with an introduction by Henrietta Leyser (Arizona State University, 2010). SARAH BRADFORD (Hayes 1956). Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times (Viking, 2010) (see Reviews). NANCY CAMPBELL (1996). How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic (Bird Editions, 2011); The Night Hunter (Z’roah Press, 2011). ELIZABETH CARMICHAEL (Becker 1966). ‘Friends, Friendship in Christianity, Modern Europe and America’ in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, Volume 4 edited by Hans-Josef Klauck et al. (de Gruyter, 2012). JACQUIE CHIRGWIN (1976). ‘Management of breast cancer with nanoparticle albumin-bound (nab)-paclitaxel combination regimens: a clinical review’ with S. L. Chua in Breast, 20, 394–406, 2011; ‘Analyses adjusting for selective crossover show improved overall survival with adjuvant letrozole compared with tamoxifen in the BIG 1-98 study’ with M. Colleoni et al. in J. Clin. Oncol, 29, 1117–34, 2011. MARGARET CLARK (1957). Understanding Religion and Spirituality in Clinical Practice (Karnac Books, 2011) (see Reviews). CHRIS CONSIDINE (Maney 1960). Behind the Lines (Cinnamon Press, 2011) (see Reviews). ALEXINE CRAWFORD (Strover 1950). Comely Grace (Wrayworks, 2011) (see Reviews). LINDSEY DAVIS (1968). Nemesis and Falco: The Official Companion (both Century, 2010) (see Reviews). CHARLES DRAZIN (1980). The Faber Book of French Cinema (Faber and Faber, 2011) (see Reviews).

57

ROSEMARY FITZGERALD (1958). A Gardener’s Guide to Native Plants of Britain

and Ireland (Crowood Press, 2012). JOANNE FOAKES (1975). ‘Immunity for International Crimes? Developments

in the Law on Prosecuting Heads of State in Foreign Courts’ (Chatham House Briefing Paper, November 2011). JUDY FORD (1976). ‘More Effective Patient Recruitment – How Clinical Research Networks can Help’ in Crfocus, 22, 21–24, 2011. HELEN HACKETT (Cobb 1980). ‘Suffering Saints or Ladies Errant? Women who travel for love in renaissance prose fiction’ in Yearbook of English Studies, 41(1), 126–40, 2011; ‘England looking outwards in the 16th and 17th centuries’ in Commentaries and Briefings, UCL European Institute, www.ucl.ac.uk; two reviews in the Times Literary Supplement. PHILIP HENSHER (1983). King of the Badgers (Fourth Estate, 2011) (see Reviews). LYNNE JONES (1973). ‘Does combining infant stimulation with emergency feeding improve psychosocial outcomes for displaced mothers and babies? A controlled evaluation from Northern Uganda’ with J. Morris et al. in American Journal of Orthopsychiatry; ‘Mental health of displaced and refugee children resettled in low-income and middle-income countries: risk and protective factors’ with R. Reed et al. in Lancet, 2011; ‘If You Could Only Choose Five Psychotropic Medicines: Updating the Interagency Emergency Health Kit’ with M. Van Ommeren et al. PLoS Med, 8, 2011. NICHOLAS LAMBERT (1997). Electronic Visions: A History of Digital Art (IB Tauris, 2011). LAURA LAZZARI (2005). Poesia epica e scrittura femminile nel Seicento: L’Enrico di Lucrezia Marinelli (Leonforte, Insula, 2010). FIONA MacCARTHY (1958). The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (Faber and Faber, 2011) (see Reviews). SIMON MASON (1981). Moon Pie (David Fickling, 2011) (see Reviews). ROGER MELLOR (1987). ‘Kirkwood, Patricia [Pat] (1921–2007)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2011). PAUL MILLER (1997), ‘Finish the Job: How to win the war in Afghanistan’ in Foreign Affairs, 90(1), 2011; ‘In Defense of Nation Building’ in Prism, 3(1), 2011. LISA PARKINSON (Burnside 1958). Family Mediation – Appropriate dispute resolution in a new family justice system (2nd edn, Jordans Publishing, 2011). MICHELLE PAVER (1979). Dark Matter (Orion, 2010) (see Reviews). SUSAN RANSON (Mills 1956). Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems, with parallel German text (with Marielle Sutherland) (Oxford University Press, 2011) (see Reviews).

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SUSAN REYNOLDS (1947). ‘Fiefs and Vassals after twelve years’ in Feudalism:

New Landscapes of Debate, edited by Sverre Bagge and others (Turnhout, Brepols, 2011). SUSAN REYNOLDS (1972). The Enlightenment in Bohemia: religion, morality and multiculturalism, edited with Ivo Cerman and Rita Krueger (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2011); various articles and translations in the British Czech and Slovak Association Review; ‘Bride of the Wind’ (poem): www.slipstream-poets.co.uk/Competition/Results/2011.htm JASMINE RICHARDS (1999). The Book of Wonders (Harper, 2012) (see Reviews). CHRISTINE SCHINTGEN (Marlin 1992). ‘Is Twilight Pro-Chastity?’ in Catholic Insight, January 2011. JAN SHIRLEY (1947). The Road to Stonehenge and Harry Bone-Thief (both Ragged Bears, 2011) (see Reviews). ANTONIA SOUTHERN (McAndrew 1952). The Queen’s Godson: Sir John Harington of Kelston 1560–1612 (Academica Press, 2011) (see Reviews). GRANT TAPSELL (1995). ‘Royalism Revisited’ in Historical Journal, 54, 2011. ELIZABETH TONKIN (1952). ‘Writing Up Imaginatively: Emotions, temporalities and social encounters’ in Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 12(2), 2010. PETER TYLER (1981). St John of the Cross (Continuum, 2010); The Return to the Mystical: Mystical Writing from Dionysius to Ludwig Wittgenstein (Continuum, 2011) (see Reviews). MARINA WARNER (1964). Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Chatto and Windus, 2011) (see Reviews). WENDY WARR (Dobson 1964). ‘Representation of chemical structures’ in Wiley Interdiscip. Rev.: Comput. Mol. Sci., 1, 557–79, 2011. SARAH WILSON (1974). The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (Yale University Press, 2010). JESSICA YATES (Kemball-Cook 1967). ‘Diana Wynne Jones in the context of children’s fantasy’, and a review of three recent books by Terry Pratchett, both in Vector, 268, 2011. Jessica has also concluded a two-year stint as collator of the literary and media listings on J. R. R. Tolkien in Amon Hen, the Tolkien Society bulletin.

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In Memoriam Barbara Mills, 1940–2011 Dame Barbara Jean Lyon Mills, DBE QC and Honorary Fellow of LMH, who died at the age of 70, was one of the most distinguished of recent LMH alumnae, with a stellar career as a trail blazer at the Bar and as a top rank civil servant. ‘Outstanding . . . marked throughout by integrity, immense hard work, sound judgment, ﬁrmness of purpose and common sense’ was how she was described by the Rt Hon Sir Christopher Rose, who ﬁrst met her as one of her tutors when he was a Fellow of Wadham in 1959. He added, in his address at Barbara’s memorial event in September 2011, that she was also excellent company. Barbara was all of that and more. She was exceptional in her day in achieving extraordinary professional success in parallel with a full family life, many and various outside interests, and the constant cherishing of some very close friendships. Barbara Warnock, as she was then called, came up to Oxford in 1959 to read Jurisprudence. Her obvious seriousness of purpose vis-àvis the curriculum did not preclude her from rapidly becoming a key member of a group of friends within LMH who have stuck together through thick and thin for more than 50 years. In those days our liberty of movement was severely constrained: men had to be out of the College by 7.15 p.m.; the ‘young ladies’ had to sign out if they intended to be out after 9.15 p.m., with a complicated system of graduated ﬁnes for coming in without having signed out, or returning after 9.15 but before midnight, when the main door was ﬁnally locked. The only solutions open to us at that point were to try to climb in without being caught (a diﬃcult exercise owing to the unfavourable architecture of LMH and the assiduous game-keeping eﬀorts of the night porter) or to ﬁnd shelter elsewhere for the night, an option fraught with other perils – including being sent down if found out. In consequence of this forcible seclusion, many evenings were spent talking endlessly in our rooms with no holds barred over mugs of Nescafe, a practice continued over the years whenever we met, albeit more probably over a glass of wine! In some ways Barbara was more mature than many of us: her father had left her mother to bring her and her younger sister Sheila up as a single parent when the girls were still small. As the elder sibling, Barbara shared her mother’s burdens of ﬁnancial worries and what in those days was still a certain degree of social opprobrium attached to divided 60

families. She already had a strong sense of responsibility towards the community, fostered by having been Head Girl at her school, St Helen’s Northwood. Full of life, good humoured, always neatly turned out, with high heels even when bicycling, she was exceptionally well organised from day one. She was quickly spotted as a suitable candidate for the JCR, and was elected President in 1960. To no one’s surprise, she won a College essay prize in Jurisprudence and History in the same year and then the University’s Gibbs Scholarship in 1961, but working hard did not prevent her from spending time with her friends and, indeed, even successfully teaching one somewhat improbable candidate to drive! She married John (Angus) Mills, whom she had met at Oxford, immediately after the end of our Schools term in 1962, beginning what was to be an extremely happy partnership of shared values, mutual aﬀection and support for nearly 50 years. She continued to study for her Bar Finals, taking that exam successfully just three weeks before the birth of their ﬁrst child, Sarah, in the summer of 1963. At that time there was signiﬁcant prejudice against, verging on outright hostility to, women barristers, who were anyway very few and far between. However, once she had ﬁnally succeeded in entering chambers in the Middle Temple, her ability and dedication were slowly recognised by her peers (and, just as importantly, by the Clerk of her Chambers who distributed the briefs) and she forced respect as she took on both civil and criminal cases of increasing complexity with success, ultimately becoming a Bencher (or member of the governing body) of the Middle Temple. In 1981, she became Junior Treasury Counsel at the Central Criminal Court and a year later a Recorder of the Crown Court, major steps towards the decision to take silk in 1986. Alongside her more serious high-proﬁle cases (including the Guinness Fraud trial and prosecution of the Brighton Bombers) there were also those which provided – at least in retrospect for her friends – a little light relief, including the defence of a man who was claimed to have sent a deadly poisonous spider concealed in ﬂowers to his girlfriend’s mother and the prosecution of Michael Fagin, who had broken into the Queen’s bedroom at Buckingham Palace for a chat and a bottle of wine. During this early period of Barbara’s career, she simultaneously ran a large house and brought up a lively family of four children. The house in Camden Town, bought in 1963 when this was not quite the chic neighbourhood it later became, was regularly transformed over the years to accommodate the needs of the family, with Barbara keeping the builders up to scratch and miraculously more or less on schedule. The story of 61

her transforming the basement into a nursery school for neighbourhood children is well known: less so the epic struggles with local oﬃcials over obscure conservation issues, culminating in a no doubt tart reminder to the lady who was objecting to non-period electric light switches that electricity had not yet been harnessed when the house was built. It was always a welcoming household: despite the pressure of all her activities, Barbara always seemed genuinely pleased to see you, taking time to sit and chat over supper without once glancing at the fearsome organisation charts for the week’s meals and family movements, to include her own and John’s work schedules, school programmes, sports and other assignments for the children, as well as everyone’s social engagements, that she worked out every weekend and pinned up in the kitchen to keep everyone on track. Family life was quite as important to Barbara as her career. Sarah Mills has described how her mother, immaculately groomed in the black outﬁt required for a barrister, cooked a full breakfast and took the children to school before heading to court. Then, ‘At 6 o’clock on the dot she would walk through the door and immediately take over, cooking supper, reading stories and putting us to bed.’ It was only years later that the children realised that their mother still had a long evening’s work ahead of her to prepare the briefs for the next day. Family holidays were also sometimes challenging, frequently taken in the early years on canal boats. Barbara’s sister recalls that ‘these weeks divided into two categories: weeks when it was so hot that some slept out and cows trampled the tents, and weeks when it was so wet that on one holiday on the Leeds and Liverpool canal we attempted to dry jeans under the grill which resulted in scorched holes and we resorted to wearing black bin liners’. In short, she made sure that her professional obligations and her successes in no way precluded a normal family life. In 1990 a new chapter began when she was appointed Head of the Serious Fraud Oﬃce (SFO), a giant intellectual and material leap from being an independent and ﬁnancially successful barrister into becoming a civil servant with a high-proﬁle job as chief executive of an important organisation. The challenge of something new and the opportunity to move into public service overcame any hesitations she may have felt. Two years later she made history again by becoming the ﬁrst woman to be appointed Director of Public Prosecutions, with the rank of Permanent Secretary, the ﬁrst woman in 40 years to have achieved membership of this élite grouping and the ﬁrst ever married woman with children to have done so. She was always well prepared for meetings at 62

this senior level of the Civil Service, and her contributions were appreciated as being to the point and pragmatic, whether or not the subject under discussion was directly related to her own department. Another glass ceiling had been shattered and a precedent set, but the road ahead was not an easy one. Running the SFO and then the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) were extremely diﬃcult tasks. At the SFO, when trying to prosecute fraud, the burden of proof was diﬃcult to establish in an often murky ﬁnancial environment. There could be endless argument about accounting practices and the legality of impenetrable thickets of overseas accounts. Indeed, one of the achievements of the SFO at this time was to point out the inadequacies of ﬁnancial regulation that allowed those accused to get acquittal through large loopholes in the law. There was nevertheless a series of high-proﬁle failed prosecutions, and fairly or unfairly, certain sections of the media and the judiciary were vociferously critical of the SFO and its head. At the CPS the situation was equally delicate. With a staﬀ of some 2,000 lawyers spread all over the country, running this organisation was a major management task. Barbara spent a good deal of time on the road to get the measure of the service at grass roots level and to try to convince everyone that the best use of public money was for the CPS to focus on cases where the weight of the evidence would most probably be suﬃcient to lead to a conviction. This policy was not to everyone’s taste and particularly resented by certain elements in the police, with resulting hostility once again in some parts of the press and claims that the CPS had gone soft on crime. Barbara refuted this and stuck to her guns and was rewarded in 1997 by being made a DBE in recognition of her lifetime of achievement – an honour which made her, her family and her many friends rightly proud. After leaving the CPS, in 1999 she was appointed the Adjudicator for Inland Revenue and the Customs and Excise, dealing with complaints from the public. (These included, among other weightier matters, complaints concerning somewhat oﬃcious Customs seizures of cars at Dover with cases of French or Belgian wine or beer piled up in the boot, leaving grannies on crutches and infants in arms stranded on the quayside in front of eager press photographers. I believe that Barbara’s common sense came into play rather swiftly on that one!) In 2009 she became the Chairman of the Professional Oversight Board established in support of the Financial Reporting Council. Among her many other pursuits over the years special mention must be made of her voluntary 63

activities in London, as Chair of the Women’s Library, a Board Member of the City University and in particular, in Camden, as Non Executive Director of the Royal Free Hospital and Governor of Haverstock School, as well as her successful eﬀorts in leading the fundraising campaign for the new LMH Law Library in 2005–6. In 2004, Barbara and her husband bought an old house near Avignon in France. John Mills had learnt to ﬂy when doing his national service in the Fleet Air Arm and after many years of summer holidays ﬂying round the world to the tightest of schedules, with a somewhat nervous Barbara Mills DBE Barbara navigating at his side and keeping a beady eye on the clock during stopovers to ensure punctuality, he now used this skill to enable them – often accompanied by fortunate friends – to visit their new base as often as possible. Perfectionist as ever, Barbara took French classes to improve her already more than passable French, and threw herself into making another comfortable and welcoming home for family and friends. She got great enjoyment from creating an elegant garden out of what had been not much more than a ﬁeld, and from watching her many grandchildren splash about in the swimming pool in summer, with trampoline, table football and bikes available for less clement weather. Tennis had always been one of her passions and she continued to play as energetically in the heat of southern France as she had done at her tennis club in Hampstead. Life was still busy but less stressful; these were happy times. An inveterate planner, she had a full diary for months ahead, crammed with events for family and friends to look forward to. Barbara died peacefully on 28 May 2011 as the result of a totally unexpected massive stroke that had left her unconscious 12 days earlier. 64

In a typically thoughtful and generous fashion, she had left a living will to ease for all concerned the diﬃcult decision to remove artiﬁcial life support should it become necessary and to allow her organs to be used for life-giving transplants. She would have hated not to be able to live life to the full and in true humanist tradition wished to improve the life of someone less fortunate when she left it. The friends who have contributed to this tribute have all stressed Barbara’s constant eﬀorts to keep in touch wherever we happened to be in the world. Elena Berger writes: ‘Key to this were the ﬂights John piloted in a small plane on business in the States. When the route was up or down the east coast Barbara organised it periodically to stop overnight with friends. Every few years they would arrive in Baltimore, have a good visit where much news was exchanged (family aﬀairs but also news from other LMH friends whom I never saw), then they would ﬂy oﬀ again next day to see other friends up or down the coast. ‘In the early days John would rent a plane on arrival in the States. These were incredibly small machines that looked to me like ﬂying sardine cans. Barbara arrived and did a large load of laundry in the basement – she said their clothes got very sweaty as they waited in the plane for take-oﬀ in high summer temperatures, for there was no air conditioning. We watched them take oﬀ next day, complete with clean laundry, in a line of planes on the runway, with the cabin doors wide open and the engine idling. Surely they couldn’t have forgotten to close the doors? Then suddenly in a practised simultaneous manoeuvre the doors slammed shut and the engines roared and the plane shot down the runway. On another arrival here from Canada the plane was thoroughly searched for drugs. I think Barbara may have been DPP at the time.’ Friends also remember the way Barbara would support those facing illness or some other diﬃculty. They have mentioned many small acts of personal and discreet kindness, or her willing mentoring and support of younger women in the legal profession. Two of the comments made summarise a consensual judgement: ‘She was interested in two things: people and problem solving, leaving things in a better state than they had been’; ‘She was pretty much unchanged essentially from the personality I knew 53 years ago, despite all her accomplishments’. It is clear that she will remain vital and fresh in our memories as a good friend and an exceptional human being and that we all miss her greatly. Among my own many happy memories of Barbara there is an early one which is particularly vivid: the sound of Edith Piaf singing ‘Non, rien de rien, Non, je ne regrette rien’ coming at full blast through a ground 65

ﬂoor window at LMH to where our little group was sitting on the lawns. More than 30 years later, I heard it again when she chose it on Desert Island Discs. I like to think she would have found it a good epitaph. This account was written by Maggy King (1959) with contributions from Elena Berger (Plotnikoﬀ), Hazel Sanger (Archer), Phoebe Wainright (Malcolm), Francesca White (Stanley), all 1959, Jane Reilly (1958), Virginia Shapiro (Makins 1957) and Annabella Scott (Loudon St Hugh’s 1958).

Simon Price, 1954–2011 Simon Price, Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at LMH from 1981 until his early retirement on health grounds in 2008, died on 14 June 2011. There are some people who set the tone and guide the deﬁning character of a place, and in LMH Simon was key in that, and he did it in his usual calm, quiet and ﬁrm way. I dare say that was true in the Faculty too. Simon made a distinguished contribution to the Faculty, and more widely as editor and then chairman of the editorial committee of the Journal of Roman Studies. There was also, signiﬁcantly, his work with his wife, the archaeologist Lucia Nixon, on the Sphakia region of Crete. In College he was among the ﬁrst male fellows. When he announced his retirement, he was still Secretary to Governing Body, so he rarely spoke, but there was a general awareness that his pen was the gauge of the contributions to discussion. Simon had a deep-rooted wisdom. When he did set that pen down, you knew that it would be a telling intervention, giving a special focus to the matter in hand. A senior colleague summed it up: ‘in a word, exemplary’. That example will remain with us. Simon chose the contents of his funeral service, at which I preached the sermon on which this obituary is based. Through the readings and hymns that he chose, I felt that he was guiding the thoughts of those who were mourning him that day. All of us who spent time with Simon in the last few years of his illness saw his deep, yet straightforward spirituality. His calm and quiet wisdom, and his value of and relish for life, were remarkable and inspiring. For example, I remember Simon’s delightful speech at his retirement dinner in College. He talked about many things, family, friends, colleagues, teaching and research – all things close to his heart. We heard about a new book he had just begun for Penguin, which he had very practically chosen to write in collaboration to ensure its completion. His collaborator this time was 66

Peter Thonemann, his colleague in the Faculty who had also been his student. At the end of his speech, to demonstrate that he was feeling pretty well, he said that he had just ﬁnished chapter 1, and I believe his last words were: ‘And tomorrow I start chapter 2.’ He knew the value of every day of life. To our delight Simon remained in College during the next academic year, 2008–9. Simon was deeply practical and when I ﬁrst joined Governing Body, Simon was the driving force in establishing the Development Oﬃce, essential to the future of the College. It had been Simon who took the preliminary advice and established the initial guidelines. The success of that venture can be seen in every aspect of College life, not least in being able to commission a master plan for the site and begin ﬁlling in the necessary buildings to make the physical shape of the College reﬂect more clearly the size and shape of what we had become. He made a remarkable and permanent contribution to the future of LMH. For Simon, though, College remained primarily about teaching, and I think the second reading he chose for his funeral, about Paul teaching on the Areopagus, was a slightly mischievous choice, since it brings in teaching about Greek religion and seems to have something of Simon’s style in deﬂating ‘superstition’, or positions that are not well founded. When I was writing my last book, I strayed into the territory of Simon’s expertise, religions of the Roman Empire, including Christianity. With me, as with so many others, Simon was immensely generous with his time, and with one or two benevolent questions he set me on a better course and saved me from potential embarrassment over basics. I felt particularly close to Simon, Lucia, and their daughters, Elisabeth and Miranda. For some years we were near neighbours, living round the Simon Price 67

corner from them in Southmoor Road. Then there was the Canadian connection. Simon was an honorary Canadian by marriage, but much better informed about Canada than I am as a Canadian by birth. He was better connected, too, I would add, and from the beginning was the key member of the triumvirate running the Canada Seminar established at LMH by Sir Brian Fall. Simon was born in London in 1954, and grew up in Manchester, where his father, later Bishop of Ripon, was attached to the cathedral. He attended Manchester Grammar School and then came up to Oxford to read Classics at Queen’s, where he was taught by Fergus Millar, the Roman historian. Simon graduated with a ﬁrst in 1976 and proceeded to graduate work where he was supervised by John North, his future collaborator. It was during a period in Cambridge, as a research Fellow at Christ’s College, that he met three more collaborators: David Cannadine, Mary Beard, and his future wife, Lucia. Signiﬁcant among Simon’s works are Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (1984), Religions of Rome (1998, two volumes with Mary Beard and John North), Religions of the Ancient Greeks (1999), and The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine (2010, with Peter Thonemann) In October 2007, during the early stages of his illness, Simon preached a university Sermon in the Chapel of LMH. It was the Ramsden Sermon, which has the prescribed subject of ‘Church Extension over the Colonies and Dependencies of the British Empire’, redeﬁned to ‘the British Commonwealth’. He began: I specialise, among other things, in the religious history of the Roman Empire. As I imagine that this fact was known to those who invited me to give this sermon, I propose to talk mostly about church extension in the Roman Empire, though I will return brieﬂy at the end to the British Empire. If this sermon were in fact the answer to an examination question, my proposed redeﬁnition might be excessive, but at least it will allow me to play to my strengths.

Simon chose as his text Paul addressing the Areopagus, and used it to characterise the relations between Christianity and paganism, saying: There are two strands to this story, a quieter strand and a hard-line strand, which won out in the end. The quieter strand is represented by the reading from the Acts of the Apostles (17:16–34), which we had a few minutes ago. . . . Paul’s speech before the Council talks about seeing the altar dedicated ‘To an Unknown God’: ‘Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.’ [Paul] went on to talk about

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God as the creator of the world. ‘God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and ﬁnd him, though he is not far from each one of us. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (expressions taken deliberately from the early Greek philosopher Epimenides). . . . This speech was a major piece of bridge-building between signiﬁcant strands between contemporary Greek thought and Christianity. Paul, in this example in what has become known as ‘natural theology’, was arguing that the Greeks had an inkling of the truth. They had some understanding which could be made deeper and more comprehensible through Christianity.

Simon contrasted this ‘quieter strand’ with a hard-line confrontational orthodoxy, and he brought that back to a consideration of church extension over the British Empire in the nineteenth century, where hardline missionary orthodoxy tended to push other religions, including Hinduism and Islam, into hard-line orthodox redeﬁnitions of themselves in response. His general conclusion was that ‘Particular historical circumstances were responsible for the dominance of the hard-line view, in both the Roman and the British Empire. Today, we need desperately to recover and to restate the quieter view, a form of “natural theology” which respects the insights of other religious traditions.’ This little sketch does not do justice to the erudition and subtlety of Simon’s extended argument, but I hope it encapsulates Simon as an advocate of the ‘quieter view’ in so many aspects of life. It is typical of an exemplary man who did so much of his distinguished research and writing in collaboration, who was dedicated to the personal engagement of teaching, who gave such strength to the fabric of his College community, who was never happier than in his family. Simon taught us so much about living in relationship; that was the mainstay of his wisdom. In his last weeks Simon was calm and at peace. Allan Doig Chaplain and Fellow

Tim Hetherington, 1970–2011 On 20 April 2011, Tim Hetherington, the distinguished photojournalist, ﬁlm-maker and LMH alumnus, was killed during heavy shelling from Gaddaﬁ’s forces on the Libyan city of Misrata. Alongside him died the American photographer Chris Hondros. Tim was 40 and at the very height of his powers. In 2007 he had won the World Press Photo award for his image of an exhausted American soldier resting in a bunker in 69

Korengal Valley. His book about the war in Liberia, Long Story Bit by Bit, was published in 2009. In 2010 the documentary Restrepo that he and Sebastian Junger made from their experience of Afghanistan won the grand jury prize at the Sundance ﬁlm festival and was nominated for an Oscar. The news of Tim’s death shook the media world. His image, and the images he had created, ﬁlled our newspapers and television screens. The war in Libya suddenly moved to centre stage, and raised the inevitable questions about why war correspondents and photojournalists do what they do. The day that Tim died I felt shocked, saddened and yet also proud – proud that a former LMH undergraduate had accomplished so much, and touched so many lives, in such a comparatively short time. Tim was one of the ﬁrst students that I interviewed in December 1988 for the new joint degree in Classics and English at LMH. I myself had only arrived at the college a few weeks earlier. Tim was then at Stonyhurst, the famous Jesuit school. He came up to LMH the following October, one of a pair of polite, extremely tall young men who formed the new Classics and English cohort. His tutorial partner, Giles Portman, has since gone on to a distinguished career in the Foreign and Commonwealth Oﬃce and was in the British embassy in Ankara (along with two other LMH alumni) when the news of Tim’s death broke. Tim was memorable as an undergraduate – his enthusiasm often expressed in a big, booming laugh that could be heard from the far side of the quad.

Tim Hetherington’s award-winning photograph

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In the best of Oxford traditions, Tim was an independent thinker and researcher. This I discovered to my cost when he decided to write an optional thesis on the Irish modernist author James Joyce. Tim was fascinated by Joyce’s ﬁnal, most obscure and diﬃcult novel, Finnegans Wake, a work which abandons formal conventions of plot and character in favour of linguistic experimentation, stream of consciousness writing style, and the evocation of dreamlike states of mind. I did not confess to Tim that I had only ever managed to get through the ﬁrst few pages. In those days the upper word limit for the optional dissertation was 25,000 words (these days most are between 5,000 and 8,000 words). Tim’s draft, some 40,000 words long, was a Joycean work in itself. With a fair bit of hacking and hewing (this in the days before word processing) we ﬁnally managed to get it down to the word limit. The Finnegans Wake saga now seems telling in the light of Tim’s subsequent work, which also made use of non-linear narratives and dream-like sequences. In 2010 he claimed that his time at LMH ‘gave me analytic skills required of an image-maker . . . I learned to be self-directed, to just get on with it. That’s important for making ﬁlms, where you have to turn the screw yourself.’ Tim’s tutorial partner Giles Portman recently wrote to me that ‘the things I remember about Tim were his ever-expanding hairstyle; his ever-expanding library of all the classics, and the fact that his rooms always became a kind of open-house meeting point for people from diﬀerent years at college. I also remember his complete self belief. Having turned down the easy option of a career in the city, Tim decided to apply for the New York ﬁlm school, without any kind of relevant background whatsoever. They turned him down (politely) but, where others might have given up with that dream, he pursued it, via the less glamorous route of a photography course at Cardiﬀ University. I remember him coming out to visit me in Prague at the time, when I had recently started at the Embassy there, and he spent the entire weekend with a collection of four old cameras hanging round his neck, taking one up at ran- Tim, on the right, with Giles Portman and dom and just taking pictures Christine Gerrard in an LMH English tutorial, incessantly of everything he 1989 71

saw. It seemed a bit eccentric at the time, but now I see where it was all leading to. The last time many of his Oxford friends saw him was at the première of his ﬁlm Restrepo in London, where he gave a talk about it after and was the same as ever.’ Tim followed the Cardiﬀ photojournalism course with an internship at the Big Issue, the magazine sold by the homeless. Tim’s casual dress style (jeans and sweatshirt) had become even grungier, his long curly hair now knitted into dreadlocks. He photographed everyone, from street vendors to ﬁlm stars, and wanted to do more with the magazine’s potential for photojournalism. What drove Tim towards war photography? It was partly the times in which he lived, as the New World Order gradually collapsed into the New World Disorder. In the mid-1990s a new generation of photojournalists began covering conﬂicts in the Balkans, the Middle East, South-east Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, their digital technology allowing them to capture images of ﬁghting unattainable by previous generations of photographers. Tim went to West Africa to cover the savage civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. He was not a ‘war tourist’ who would drop in and out of conﬂicts for a few days at a time. Tim became deeply involved with the people he was covering. In Liberia he became a respected chronicler of Charles Taylor’s war crimes and was for this reason appointed an investigator for the UN Liberia sanctions committee in 2006. Tim worked not only to see the guilty brought to justice but also to rehabilitate the injured through sport, an activity which had a characteristically quirky spin-oﬀ when he was asked to manage the Kenyan Taekwondo team in Korea. The quality of Tim’s work in Africa brought him to the notice of Vanity Fair. In 2007 he was commissioned, along with the journalist Sebastian Junger, to embed with 2 Platoon, B Coy 173 Airborne in the Korengal Valley in Eastern Afghanistan. At that time international attention was focused on Iraq. Tim’s expectation that he was joining a peace-keeping mission was soon exploded, as the soldiers fought oﬀ enemy attacks day after day. Tim stayed with them, sharing the danger, the discomfort, the monotony and the terror. The result was Restrepo, a work which so powerfully captured the interior life of a platoon that it established Tim as one of the leading documentary ﬁlm makers of the early twenty-ﬁrst century. Tim now found himself inundated with oﬀers from news agencies, television companies, and magazines and newspapers. When the Arab Spring erupted it was inevitable Tim would join in the eﬀorts to cover it. He didn’t do it to establish a reputation – that was already secure. 72

Rather, like Marie Colvin in Syria a year later, he did it to bear witness to the struggles of people against armed oppressors and to make it impossible for the world to ignore their plight. It was thanks to the work of Tim and his colleagues that Western military intervention began on 19 March 2011. Three weeks later, on the day before he was killed, Tim tweeted from the besieged city of Misrata ‘No sign of NATO’. The following day, Tim and fellow photographer Chris Hondros were in the thick of the ﬁghting, following a group of rebels as they fought their way through units of Gaddaﬁ’s soldiers. By the afternoon the streets had become quiet. Tim and Chris decided to chance a break for the harbour. Running through the rubble-strewn streets, they were hit by a barrage of mortar bombs. Tim, bleeding heavily from a wound in his femoral artery, was carried to hospital in the back of a truck, but died before it arrived. Such was Tim’s status that his death was covered by all the news programmes in our modern interconnected world, from the BBC and CBS to Al Jazeera and Press TV. Just days later, the Libyan city of Ajdabiya renamed its largest square after him. Anti-Gaddaﬁ protesters also held a march to the newly rechristened Tim Hetherington Square in his honour. Tim’s funeral in London was attended by over 500 family, friends and colleagues, with other memorial services in New York and Libya. Thousands posted their condolences on websites. In November 2011 the Front Line Club, the association of war correspondents, posthumously awarded Tim and Chris Hondros the 2011 Frontline Memorial Tribute Award. In LMH, Tim’s death provoked a moving response from a whole generation of undergraduates who had never met him, but knew him Tim Hetherington 73

through his work. The Sunday night after he died, the Simpkins Lee theatre was packed with students watching a special showing of Restrepo. In honour of his memory a group of LMH students has established the Hetherington Society, which ‘through screenings, exhibitions and discussions . . . aims to raise awareness of social issues worldwide’. It is a tribute of which I think Tim would have been especially proud. Christine Gerrard Fellow and Tutor in English

Dr John Donnison Bailey, 1931–2011 John Bailey was proud to be an Australian: ‘a quiet Australian’. Indeed, many of us for some time did not even know he was an Australian. This is not because he was trying to hide his origins; far from it. He and Faye, his wife of 57 years, never forsook their Australian nationality and never applied for British passports. I got to know John very well when he came to All Souls as Senior Bursar in 1990, as at that time I was Steward of the Kitchen, which a little later was subsumed under the somewhat broader remit of College Steward. This meant that I worked closely with John and we became good friends. Nevertheless I knew little of his earlier life and career, for John was a modest, even self-eﬀacing person. I recognised that he had exceptional qualities but never heard a word from him of his achievements. A member of a distinguished Australian family; a ﬁne sportsman in his youth and a tennis player into old age; a lover of the outdoors, including ﬁshing; an outstanding student of economic history at Melbourne and Oxford who was sought after by Australian universities; a ﬁnancial doctor to several British manufacturing companies during diﬃcult ﬁnancial times; and the guardian of the fortunes of three Oxford colleges, he has left a mark that is worthy of high esteem and celebration. John was born with an Oxford connection. His father Kenneth (later Sir Kenneth Bailey, CBE, QC), had been a Rhodes Scholar at Corpus Christi College. He was described as being of ‘scholarly countenance and unfailing courtesy [who] spoke in mellow tones and measured language . . . [but] not given to outward displays of emotion’. Like father like son you will say: I never once heard John raise his voice. John’s mother, Editha Yseult Donnison, was British: an art student at the Slade, she became an excellent potter. Like her, John had a deep appreciation of art, design and music. 74

John’s connections with Britain were deep, secure and long-lasting. From 1955 onwards, when he and Faye, just married, came to Oxford, he spent almost all his life in this country. At ﬁrst it looked as if John was destined for an academic career. He had proceeded from the BA in History and Economic History at Melbourne to an MA, and from there to a Research Assistantship at the Australian National University. His MA dissertation, ‘Growth and Depression: Contrasts in the Australian and British Economies, 1870–1880’, was published by ANU in 1956, by which time he had taken up a scholarship to pursue his DPhil at his father’s old college, Corpus, although he spent much of his time in Nuﬃeld College. He worked fast: his thesis was submitted in November 1956 and the degree awarded in 1957. It concerned the ﬂow of capital from Britain, through ﬁnance companies, to the Australian pastoral economy, in particular wool producers in the years 1870 to 1893. Articles in the Economic History Review and Economic Record followed. What to do next? He was torn between academic life and following his interest in ﬁnance in the world of business. It was real industry, especially minerals and steel, that caught his imagination. After seven years of experience and rising responsibilities in a company producing heatresistant materials he reached a major crossroad. He had not neglected his interest in economic history, for he had taken on an entirely new project in his ‘spare time’: a meticulous centenary history of the Australian Mercantile Land and Finance Company, 1863 to 1963, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1966. One reviewer noted that, by deﬁnition, it was rather dry, but that it had perked up when the author got to the disastrous impact of the plague of rabbits that hit the sheep pastures. This book John Bailey 75

cemented his already high reputation, especially in Australian academic circles, as the authority on overseas investment, and led in 1971 to the oﬀer of a Professorship in Economic History by the University of New South Wales. At the same time John had been oﬀered the post of Development Director (later to be upgraded to Executive Director) by a Sheﬃeld steel manufacturer, Balfour Darwin, a company with Australian connections. Unsure to the last moment which position to accept, he wrote two letters, one to each accepting the oﬀer, walked a long mile to the post-box and only when there chose industry. It was a tough decision and a tough job in what a union leader called the ‘socialist republic of South Yorkshire’, especially as the company was in decline like others in the steel industry. After ﬁve years he went to try to save another company, but by 1983, after 24 years in the business world, he had had enough. Faye tells me that it was at Christmas 1983, sitting before a blazing ﬁre with a glass of good wine, that the decision was made. John announced that he would like to try to become a Bursar. Surely his ﬁnancial experience, his administrative ability, his skills in personnel management, combined with his academic background and understanding of the demands of research, would all come in handy. And so it proved to be. John Bailey was snapped up by St Antony’s, where he spent six happy years and contributed a great deal to the life, administration and ﬁnancial stability of the college. It was not surprising that when Charles Wenden, in his ﬁnal year as All Souls’ indomitable bursar, and Tony Honoré, the very percipient Acting Warden while Warden Neill was serving as Vice-Chancellor, went in search of a successor to Wenden, they were very keen to lure Dr Bailey to All Souls. John took up his post in January 1990. Charles Wenden had such conﬁdence in John’s ability that he did not stay around for a protracted hand-over but took leave to South Carolina. He was right. The new Bursar stepped seamlessly and conﬁdently into the big boots of his predecessor. It was a very big job, which involved: taking charge of the college investments, estates and ﬁnancial relations with other colleges and the university, for authorising or refusing to authorise expenditure, subject only to the College statutes and the authority of the various committees, and the appointment, discipline, terms of service and dismissal, subject to the authority of the Warden, of all staﬀ.

He was progressive, too. As soon as he could, he stealthily expanded the role of women in college life. Kind and supportive to Fellows, young and old, he was particularly keen to increase the opportunities for post76

doctoral Fellows, welcomed new Fellows to College warmly, and put on a proper basis the joint equity scheme to help them to purchase accommodation in Oxford. He worked hard to identify good investment opportunities and, although always exercising due care, was ready to act swiftly when a great opportunity presented itself. As far as his academic interests were concerned, John supported producing the History of the College. Particularly keen to examine the development of the College estates he set about the necessary archival research. But alas he was not able to complete this work, as cancer begun to bite even before he retired in 1998. There is, though, Faye assures me, a wealth of material available to anyone who would care to take up this fascinating subject. John was elected to an Emeritus Fellowship, but was not ready for full-time retirement. At the end of 1998 his reputation as an outstanding bursar was such that he was snapped up by Sir Brian Fall, Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, who had been anxious about the state of the college ﬁnances. John agreed to a half-time appointment as College Treasurer for two years, subsequently extended to three years. As Sir Brian put it, with ‘quiet authority’ he quickly stabilised the expenditure and put everything in good order. Yet again his sensible, balanced approach to college life and ﬁnancial aﬀairs had inspired conﬁdence and great respect. John Bailey will be remembered by all as an exemplar of service, rectitude, utter reliability, good judgement, sincere friendship and, behind his apparent reticence, a warm and loveable personality. There are far too few of his ilk. We are grateful for permission from Professor Roger Hood CBE, QC (Hon), PhD, DCL, LLD (Hon), FBA, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls, to publish extracts from the address he gave at Dr Bailey’s memorial service.

Eva Gillies (née Krapf), 1930–2011 Meeting Eva in 1948, when we were both freshers reading English, was an unforgettable experience. Many of us arriving at LMH then were barely out of school, a wartime generation still subject to the rationing of clothes and other goods. By contrast Eva, straight from Buenos Aires and speaking four languages ﬂuently, glowed with sophistication. Her clothes were glamorous, although in no way ﬂaunting, and it was obvious she came from a wealthy background. She became known as the Argentine bombshell in allusion to the legendary ﬁlm star, Carmen 77

Miranda, called the Brazilian bombshell, but it soon became apparent that she was clever as well as dazzling and was the English scholar of our year. She had considerable social and intellectual conﬁdence without being arrogant, and her Sunday tea parties in her room in Deneke caused a traﬃc jam on the staircase. A bond between us was our Catholicism: she had been educated in a Catholic convent school and, on coming to LMH, soon established an aﬀectionate relationship with the Sacred Heart sisters in Norham Gardens. Her relationship with the church, as in some other aspects of her life, may have been unconventional, but she remained loyal to her faith and appears to have derived strength from it in her widowhood. I remember with gratitude her warmth and loyalty to her friends, such as myself, whose experience of the world was so limited at that stage in comparison with hers. Although after LMH our lives proceeded in diﬀerent directions, she never lost touch and would send postcards from distant places. On one occasion when we met in Oxford after some years, I admired the impressive large briefcase she was carrying, which was stamped in clear black letters, ‘Interpol’. She replied with her familiar assurance: ‘Yes, I picked this up at an international conference where I was an interpreter and it has helped me out of a number of diﬃcult situations since then!’ I think, like myself, she retained a great affection for LMH and in her later years visited Oxford regularly. After the emotional upheaval of two engagements while she was an undergraduate and the traumatic death of her ﬁrst husband in an air crash, it was good to know that she enjoyed great happiEva Gillies 78

ness with her second husband, Mick Gillies. Their home was in Sussex and after his death she remained there, enjoying the support of her stepfamily in her ﬁnal illness. Priscilla Tolkien (1948 English) After leaving Oxford in 1951 Eva returned to Buenos Aires, but found herself unemployable in Peronist Argentina. As was to happen so many times in her life, her striking personality and obvious ability led people to go out of their way to help advance her career, and she was invited by a private foundation, at the age of 22, to lead the Argentinian delegation to the World Federation of United National Associations. The other two delegates were equally young and they became known in Geneva as the Argenteenagers! There, she was helped to bypass the usual preliminaries to becoming a simultaneous interpreter and, as the international conference circuit spread, she took every opportunity to travel widely. She went to virtually all the countries in Europe, and to Cuba, Mexico, India, Ghana and Nigeria. She was always adventurous and, at the end of the French war in Indo-China in 1954, she accepted a nine-month assignment in Hanoi with the Armistice Commission to North Vietnam. An aﬀair with a Canadian delegate led to her being suspected of spying and, anxious to refute this, she went to a Mardi Gras party wearing a black cloak and massive earrings, sporting a long cigarette holder and carrying a toy pistol and a number of documents marked ‘Top secret’. Was she Mata Hari? asked someone. In 1959 Eva saw an exhibition in Zurich of pre-Columbian Mexican art and her interest in social anthropology was born. She returned to Oxford in 1962 and became a student at the Institute of Social Anthropology, where she was immediately at home among the Catholic community. She took her Diploma at the end of her ﬁrst year and was encouraged to continue her studies. West Africa was her main interest (she had lived in Nigeria with her ﬁrst husband) and she went on to obtain a BLitt subsequently published as Yoruba Towns and Cities – An Enquiry into the Nature of Urban Social Phenomena (Eva Krapf-Askari, Oxford University Press, 1969). Eva then spent two years in Northern Nigeria doing ﬁeldwork among the Yoruba and Ogori. At the end of her tour she was invited to join the staﬀ of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she taught for three years while writ79

ing her Oxford DPhil thesis, alas never published. Later she wrote an abridgement of Professor E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford University Press, 1976). In 1970 Eva married Mick Gillies and became a Sussex country housewife with two teenage step-daughters. She threw herself into this alien role with her customary enthusiasm. Only ironing and sewing defeated her! She shared with Mick a passion for Africa and they spent several months each year in the Gambia, living up-country in a thatched mud hut and bathing in the river. While Mick pursued his research into mosquitoes, Eva learned the native language, Mandinka. After Mick’s retirement in 1983 they travelled widely, including a visit to Hanoi, which Eva had so enjoyed over 30 years earlier. She also translated into English an Argentine classic, Mansilla’s A Visit to the Ranquel Indians, published in 1997 by the University of Nebraska. Widowhood followed and, at the time of her death, Eva was ﬁnalising her autobiography, which will be published shortly. At the age of 80 she was still regarded as exotic. June Stephenson (Friend of almost 50 years)

Patricia Kean, 1923–2011 Patricia Kean was born in Kensington in 1923 and grew up, as she once said, in the London of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway. But she spent much of her time at the family’s cottage in Surrey where her deep love of the countryside developed. We were both in the 1941 English year and the friendship that began there was to last unbroken for 70 years. Something of our future was foreshadowed, perhaps, in growing the LMH wartime vegetables. Patricia was one of the very few Oxford undergraduates (two only in LMH) allowed to ﬁnish her course in exchange for undertaking to teach immediately afterwards instead of interrupting her degree to do war work. She got her First in 1944 and went on the teach the medieval course at Edinburgh. She then returned to Oxford and taught the medieval papers as a freelance for several of the men’s colleges. When Dorothy Everett became a University Reader, her LMH Tutorship and Fellowship was advertised and Patricia was persuaded to apply, in due course following her tutor at LMH. But she was never, I think, a career academic and some years later resigned her Fellowship and wrote 80

her books. She continued to lecture for the Faculty and as a six-hour Lecturer taught LMH undergraduates until she retired in 1979. She enjoyed tutorials, if not too many! For some years she remained on the Council of the Early English Text Society. In 1955 we moved our domestic base to the country – ﬁrst to Standlake and ten years later to Latchford, an ancient house once the manor of the deserted village. This, with its ten acres, we cherished as a place of quiet where one might work and think. In 1987 we had to face, without any warning, the threat of a new town (to be called Stone Bassett) which would have swallowed Latchford and most of the neighbourhood. Patricia played a prominent part in the battle and at last we won. It was a famous victory, the experts said. Patricia’s chief legacy is two remarkable books, The Pearl: An Interpretation (London, 1967) and Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), but she had many other talents. From youth she was a skilled needlewoman; she could spin and weave or knit the ﬂeeces from our little ﬂock of Jacob’s sheep. She was a brave and patient gardener, not only of organic vegetables but of trees: Dutch elm disease had followed us to Latchford and we had lost many. She could build a stone wall and a dry stone wall. She was herself an accomplished poet. And there were the hounds. We had been concerned for many years to keep unchanged the two ancient breeds, Afghan Hounds and Salukis. Patricia was a respected judge of both breeds in the UK and in Europe. Her large library shows the range of her interests, in science as well as in the arts. She was widely read in the novel and would return periodically to wrestle with Henry James where he is most opaque. She was open, in fact, to the multifariousness of the world and, deploring occupational gloom, did not panic. Her response to the threat of global warming was to support Kew’s great seed collection. She loved Latchford and she loved to travel. Elizabeth Mackenzie Emeritus Fellow

Carol Anne Howard (née Gaynor), 1937–2011 Carol came up to LMH to read English in 1956. Although she was born in Birmingham, she had spent much of her childhood abroad, as her father worked for the Shell Petroleum Company in Venezuela, then 81

Texas, New York, Trinidad and Egypt before being transferred back to London. Her father, who died barely a year before she came to LMH, was Irish and Catholic, her mother a descendant of Sampson Lloyd, the Welsh Quaker banker. Carol and her three younger sisters were educated at St Mary’s School, Ascot, then staﬀed almost entirely by nuns. Slim, dark-haired and attractive, independent-minded and very well informed, she was, as one of her friends recalled, ‘someone who was noticed’. She made friends easily, in and outside College and in the university theatrical world. In her ﬁrst long vacation she and Natalie Williams went as wardrobe mistresses with the group, including Dudley Moore, which presented the Oxford Revue at the newly established Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. They camped in a Masonic Lodge and Carol and Natalie were given walk-on parts for which they were required to wear ﬁshnet tights, then considered rather daring. Barbara Scott, another of her friends, was also in Edinburgh. Later, Carol played the heroine, Rosaura, in an Experimental Theatre Club (ETC) production of Calderon’s Life is a Dream, dressed as the text stipulates in ‘male travelling attire’. A former president of the ETC remembers her as a very vibrant person, full of vitality and with an exceptionally wide range of interests. Her circle of friends outside LMH included some of the most talented undergraduates of the day, such as Francis Hope, Julian Mitchell and Patrick Garland. In her ﬁnal exams Carol did particularly well in Middle English and some years later she followed this up by learning German and taking a London University MA in fourteenth-century literature, while mediaeval art became a new enthusiasm. For many years after leaving LMH she remained in touch with Miss Mackenzie, who had been her tutor and became a close friend. Well accustomed from childhood to being abroad, in the long vacations and later she was an excellent travelling companion to several of her Oxford contemporaries, knowledgeable not only about what to see but about where to stay and how to get there, organising journeys to Italy, to what was then Yugoslavia, and around Greece, and, perhaps less predictably, enjoying walking holidays in Ireland. When I was in Venice with her in 1980 she was as well-informed about food, restaurants and shopping as about churches, galleries and palaces. After graduating, Carol had several jobs, including one as assistant to the classical music manager of Ibbs and Tillett, the concert agency in Wigmore Street, and a spell in a Foreign Oﬃce department doing research on Africa, before joining the Observer (then edited by David 82

Astor) as an editorial assistant. In the mid-1960s she was one of two journalists responsible for the Pendennis column, at a time when it had considerable space and prominence in the paper. This was the job which she found most stimulating and in which she was happiest, and it was while she was there that she met Anthony Howard, the newly appointed Whitehall Correspondent of the Sunday Times, whom she married in 1965. From 1966 they spent three years in Washington, where Tony was the chief correspondent of the Observer during the Johnson presidency. Carol ﬁtted easily into the political and journalistic scene. She enjoyed going to the party conventions on which Tony was reporting, visiting other parts of America, and generally being part of the action. She was in Georgetown during the devastating riots in Washington which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, and with Tony followed the campaign in support of their friend, Senator Eugene McCarthy, in his challenge for the Democratic leadership later that year. Charlotte Johnson-Wahl (Fawcett 1961), who was also in Washington, painted a wonderful portrait of Carol, sitting elegantly in an armchair, cigarette in hand, and looking quietly amused. She was always an enthusiastic ﬁlm buﬀ and while at LMH sometimes made unauthorised visits to London to see obscure foreign ﬁlms of which most of us had not heard. The cinema, like the opera and ballet, was to be a lasting interest and for some time after she returned from America she worked at the British Film Institute. Her enthusiasms could be eclectic: one of the Howards’ parties in Addison Avenue included members of the fan club of David Bowie, with whom she had won (in an Evening Standard competition) an interview. Carol Howard photographed as an undergraduate 83

From 1994 until 2008 the Howards divided their time between London and Dinham Lodge, a handsome Georgian house in Ludlow where Carol could pursue her interest in racing and explore the Welsh Marches which she loved, and where at weekends they entertained friends, often from across the political spectrum. Her practical and artistic side came to the fore in redecorating the house and redesigning the garden. The playwright John Osborne and his wife Helen lived nearby at Clun. Helen, whom Carol had known on the Observer, was a fellow racing enthusiast and became a close friend. She shared her interest in literature and the theatre and cinema and, like her, was a deﬁant smoker. Both hated humbug and could be acerbic and sometimes waspish; Carol was much saddened by Helen’s death in 2004. The Howards had no children but Carol had an easy and aﬀectionate relationship with her nephews and nieces and was invariably loyal and supportive to her younger friends, who included several of Tony’s colleagues. Robert Harris, in his address at Tony’s funeral, spoke of the great importance of her support to Tony in his work as journalist and political commentator. For some years before she died Carol had a severe and painful form of arthritis which restricted what she could do and ﬁnally conﬁned her to her home. But she had always been an omnivorous reader, and in the last year, as well as keeping up with new publications, she enjoyed reading or re-reading nineteenth-century novels and particularly Dickens: the last book that she was reading was Dombey and Son. Tony Howard’s sudden death before Christmas 2010 was a cruel blow. She herself became ill soon after and was diagnosed with terminal cancer at Easter 2011. She accepted the diagnosis bravely and died at her home in Kensington a few weeks later. Priscilla Thomas (1956 History)

Henrietta Llewelyn Davies, 1954–2011 Henrietta Lissadell Llewelyn Davies died on 15 March 2011, the Ides of March – an appropriate date, she might have felt, for an astrologer and psychic. Her wide circle of friends, admirers and clients, however, mourn it as an inappropriately early end, at the age of 56, of a brilliant, generous, kind and original person. The form of words is often ‘after a long struggle with cancer’ but Henri would never admit that the enemy was within her gates and, 84

though she went through various treatments, her ultimate decision to let events take their course was characteristic of her refusal to subject herself to conventional expectations. In this she must have been much like her mother Jane (LMH 1942), who deﬁed contemporary opinion as an unmarried mother, bringing up Henri alone, with the help of a devoted nanny who enabled Jane to support the household by a career in advertising. When Henri was 15, however, her mother died of breast cancer, a devastating loss, and the subsequent misery of boarding school sent Henri into a withdrawn inner world from which she was only gradually emerging when she arrived at LMH in 1973. ‘As a tutorial partner in English Literature,’ says Katie Kingshill, ‘Henri was not always an easy proposition. She would often simply not answer questions and I would ﬁnd myself inanely ﬁlling the ensuing silence, knowing, as our patient tutor knew too, that Henri was more than capable of producing an astute, well-reasoned essay. Seemingly this process happened by osmosis, as Henri appeared to spend her time dispensing endless coﬀee, tea and biscuits to friends, who discovered in her a source of wisdom, perception and comfort, the foundation of her later calling. I was fascinated by her tarot readings, she and I sharing an admiration for Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps.’ Henri’s vocation came to her through a literary source: the discovery of an out-of-print book on astrology by Louis MacNeice. After sampling various jobs in publishing and oﬃce administration, this revelation of where her life’s work really lay came as a relief. She travelled to India, learnt much about astrology and on her return wrote horoscope columns for several publications, including Woman’s Own and Cosmopolitan, and began to oﬀer private readings. A talent for astrological charts was augmented by a psychic gift, no surprise to Henrietta Llewellyn Davies 85

her Oxford friends. ‘I would often hear voices, . . . telling me what to say to a client about their particular circumstances,’ she said. ‘I found that I could use the birth chart as a basic tool . . . but that the most extraordinary advice was just coming through. Over and over again, clients would tell me how right the advice had been.’ The accuracy of her insights attracted notice and her loyal clients included well-known writers, barristers and investors. Jeanette Winterson approached Henri for advice on astrological charts for a contemplated novel and became a devoted client, making few decisions without Henri’s input. Indeed, Henri would consider any questions asked her, from those about property and money to matters of creative endeavour and personal relationships. ‘I open my mouth and things ﬂy out,’ she explained, though she saw herself as a counsellor as much as soothsayer. ‘I’ve always dealt mostly in emotional traumas.’ Though Henri’s immediate family circle was so small, no account of her life would be complete without reference to her illustrious family connections, of which she was understandably proud. The novelist Daphne du Maurier was ﬁrst cousin to Henri’s grandfather Jack, one of the Llewelyn Davies boys befriended by J. M. Barrie and providing the inspiration for Peter Pan. Henri’s great-grandmother, Jack’s mother, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, built a close friendship with Barrie who eventually became guardian of her ﬁve boys. Henri’s great-great-grandfather, Sylvia’s father, George du Maurier, wrote Trilby, the best-selling novel exploring hypnotism which introduced the term ‘Svengali’ into the language. A more than usual compound of paradoxes, Henri was a family person without a family, an eccentric with her feet ﬁrmly on the ground, a brilliant intellectual with a ﬂair for social pleasures, a loner who inspired deep and lasting friendships, and for whom the care and devotion of her long-term partner, James Manning, enabled her to die peacefully at home. Katie Fischel (Kingshill 1973 English) and Nadia Crandall (Woloshyn 1974 English)

Mary Irene Anderson MBE, 1920–2010 My sister, always known as Rene, was born in Meikle Earnock, a village near Hamilton, Ayrshire. With a father from Perth and a mother from Glasgow, she was always proud of her Scottishness, despite or 86

because of her English upbringing in Doncaster, where our father taught. At Doncaster High School Rene excelled in both academic work and sport and ﬁnished as Head Girl. She won an exhibition to LMH where she graduated with honours in geography. On Sundays she worshipped at St Columba’s Church and was a member of the Iona Society and the Student Christian Movement. I remember how impressed she was by George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, when he visited to recruit members – until she discovered he was only interested in male students. Rene remained much attached to LMH and listened eagerly to my reports of its current developments when I visited during recent alumni weekends. (By then her health had declined and she lived at Drummond Grange Nursing Home.) After LMH, Rene taught for two years in Westmorland so that she could train as a Deaconess of the Church of Scotland at St Colm’s Women’s Missionary College, Edinburgh. After working among ﬁsher girls in Aberdeen she left to work in Ghana, ﬁrst at Achimota College and then for over 25 years as Headmistress of Aburi Girls Secondary School. As an enthusiastic and inﬂuential ﬁgure there, Rene was honoured by Ghana itself and also in the UK with an MBE for services to African education. She was, indeed, a force to be reckoned with. For example, one prospective military coup was hampered by the fact that the insurgents were too much in awe of Rene to ask if they might have access to their guns, which were in the school safe. On another occasion, during Nkrumah’s presidency, she refused to allow her girls to stand for hours in the sun to cheer his passing. She made this stand for health, not political reasons. Rene commissioned us to ﬁnd her a house in the Garvald area of East Lothian for her leave and, ﬁnally, retirement. We discovered ‘The Beehive’ which was at that point quite decrepit and in need of total renovation. At the time it belonged to the monks of Nunraw, with Rene Anderson MBE 87

whom she became friendly. From then on Garvald became her home and her focus – the church, garden, moorland walks, and painting in watercolour – with holidays in Barr, Ayrshire, and Ardnamurchan. One particular interest of Rene’s was tracing the family tree back to the sixteenth century. She became a source of knowledge about the history of Garvald, too, and was occasionally consulted by letter or visit from people in search of their roots in the area. Aburi School retained her interest and concern to the last. Her students remained in touch – many have gone on to distinguished work in diﬀerent ﬁelds. One group working in the UK and Dublin visited her at Drummond Grange and entertained us to lunch and a slide show of new developments, including a building named after Rene. In her will she left the school money to improve the library. Nansie Blackie (Anderson 1941 PPE)

Mary Faris (née Campbell), 1920–2011 Mary Campbell came to Oxford from Glasgow University, the daughter of an electrician who worked in the Glasgow shipyards, a keen trade unionist, and a doughty man in argument. She had been able, under the admirable Scottish education system, to get a degree in Classics and then, as it were of right because of her ability, to advance to Oxford without social anxieties, though no doubt her friendship with Snell exhibitioners at Balliol helped. I met her on the ﬁrst day of term in October 1941, having purloined her light bulb and then feeling guilty. We became friends at once. Since she had a degree already she was excused the ﬁrst year of Honour Mods and joined the ﬁve of us who were going to sit the exam in 1942. She was unlucky in that her whole time in Oxford was spent under wartime conditions. But at least things were interestingly diﬀerent. To suit the needs of the young men who were receiving military training, lectures might be held in the evening, and might last two hours. The teaching staﬀ included distinguished refugees from Europe, some local retired scholars, and several men who were known to be reluctant usually to teach women. But at least Martha Kneale was still in LMH as our tutor. It was a time of austerity, with food severely rationed. Peggy Marshall and I, ﬁrewatching over the Christmas vacation, were delighted to receive from Mary back in Glasgow an unrationed haggis, though we had some diﬃculty in cooking 88

it. The LMH pantry where we boiled it for three hours stank horribly when we opened the door. Our exams coincided with the opening of the Second Front in France, but we got our degrees and Mary became a lecturer in Latin at Queen’s University Belfast. She kept her grandmother’s home in a ﬁsherman’s cottage on the Isle of Bute, and it was there in 1945 that we enjoyed hearing the ships’ sirens in the bay celebrating the end of the war with Japan. Austerity continued and visits to her in Belfast were punctuated with trips to Dublin, to enjoy gargantuan mixed grills. We did, however, avoid the trap of buying shoes in Dublin on the day when many of our fellows on the return train were stopped in Belfast by customs oﬃcers and had the shoes taken oﬀ their feet. Some had left their worn-out old shoes behind and had to go home barefoot. In Belfast she met and married John Faris, himself of Worcester College and a logician, who became Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen’s. He came from a large and distinguished Ulster family. As, eventually, the mother of four boys and a professor’s wife, Mary could only teach part time and take her share of examining, but she retained her interest in Latin and belonged to a study group which produced medieval Irish Latin texts; she also translated some of Thomas Hobbes’ De Cive for the Oxford edition. I visited her and John during their holidays on the coast of Antrim. Mary learned to swim in the chilly waters there, and gashed her legs climbing over the sharp rocks. She always had courage. We did long walks to the distillery at Bushmills, where the resident excise oﬃcer was a friend, though Mary herself was not a drinker. In later years we seldom met because the troubles returned to Northern Ireland and I had a young family; I did not feel I could risk visits to Belfast. I know that academic visitors who did go were royally welcomed. Mary and John maintained strict impartiality Mary Faris 89

in religious matters. At election time John ferried nuns from their convent to the polling station. Mary helped at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau on the Shankill Road, where her experience of friendly local people was at odds with its notorious reputation. Meanwhile the four boys ﬂourished, followed diﬀerent careers, and settled in diﬀerent parts of the British Isles. Friends regretted that George, John and Paul did not have a brother called Ringo, but the second son, Neil, was named after Mary’s father. After many happy years in Belfast, John and Mary moved to Coney Island near Ardglass on the coast of County Down. Sadly, towards the end Mary had a long period of ill health, which she bore with characteristic stoicism. She was able to live at home with the help of a devoted housekeeper and team of carers, and had the comfort of being with John until the beginning of 2011, when he died suddenly at the age of 97. Her spirit remained strong; she was glad to live to the end in her cottage by the sea at Coney Island, having the love of a large family, including three daughters-in-law, four grandchildren and one great-grandson. Pamela Huby (Clark 1940 Lit Hum)

Mathilde Marjorie Matius (Marna) Glyn (née Buckatsch), 1919–2012 Marna Buckatsch was one of the few undergraduates reading PPE in my time at LMH, having come up from Sheﬃeld City Grammar School in 1939, her brother John being then a young don at Balliol. Graduating in 1942 with a second in PPE, she did war work in an engineering factory for two years before training as a medical social worker (then called hospital almoner) at St Thomas’s hospital where she took part in work on the connection between smoking and lung cancer. She left in 1942 to enter the Civil Service, ﬁrst in the Medical Research Council and later in the Commission for Racial Equality. Her career embraced her passionate concern to improve people’s living conditions through the health and social services. Active in ﬁelds related to these interests and a member of CND, Marna turned to political action through local government, serving as a labour councillor in the then borough of Holborn. In particular she was one of the founders of Amnesty International and followed keenly its development as a major inﬂuence on public attitudes. 90

The bare recital of her career may conjure up an image of a seriousminded do-gooder, but Marna tempered her positive convictions with a happy family life and wide circle of friends. She was married for 40 years to Denis Glyn, who practised as a GP in south London where he was also active in local aﬀairs, including serving as a governor of the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education where he used to keep me up to date after the meetings by reporting the educational and other achievements of their sons, David Marna Glyn and John. Marna saw a great deal of her very close LMH friend Mary Shenai (known as Sydney Stepledon at LMH) with whom she shared a holiday house at Hambledon where one was welcome for Sunday lunch; living within easy reach in London, we used to meet regularly until Sydney died. In recent years she has enjoyed taking her grandchildren to the LMH Gaudy garden party. Marna was a woman of ﬁrm convictions, energetically pursuing various causes related to her prime interests and blessed with a delightful personality, making her an asset at any gathering. She was always a stimulating companion, with a keen sense of humour and wide interests; I shall miss her. Catherine Avent (1939 English)

Hilda Mary Hunt, 1912–2011 Mary Hunt was born in 1912 at Long Eaton, then in Nottinghamshire. Her father was an insurance agent with the splendid Victorian name of Hardwick Hunt. After school in Matlock she gained an exhibition to read English at LMH in 1931. On graduation she remained in Oxford to take her teaching diploma and during the war she taught in Cornwall. Sadly, her ﬁancée, a pilot with the RAF, was killed in action. Many years later she confessed that it was then that she made her decision to devote her life to teaching – a commitment she fulﬁlled totally. 91

After the war Mary moved with her mother to Leamington and thence to Warwick in 1951. She was appointed to the post of English mistress at Leamington College for Girls in 1947, becoming Acting Headmistress in the 1960s, owing to the illness of the incumbent, then Headmistress in 1968 until her retirement in 1972 after 25 years of service. She was by all accounts a remarkable teacher, her love and enthusiasm for the English language and literature an inspiration to her pupils. Her drama classes and productions are still the talk of today’s school reunions. The Leamington College stage was very small and unsuitable for full-scale productions. Undaunted, Mary staged highly successful events on the premises of Leamington College for Boys. In later years, under her guidance, the two schools staged several joint productions. In 1960 Leamington College for Girls moved to its ﬁrst purpose-built school in Cloister Way, Leamington Spa, and Mary now had all the facilities needed for some spectacular productions. After retirement Mary remained loyally committed to the Leamington College Association. In 2002, well over 200 past pupils and members of staﬀ celebrated the centenary of Leamington College for Girls. Mary Hunt, aged 90, sat on the top table and was the one person who linked everyone in the room. There were several speeches from retired members of staﬀ and then Miss Hunt stood up. Standing very erect she delivered her speech in a remarkably clear voice. When she sat down, the whole audience stood up to give her a loud and enthusiastic ovation. Despite the closure of Leamington College in 1977, the Old Girls were suﬃciently inspired by Mary to arrange for 90 girls to come to her 90th birthday lunch in 2002. Dorothy Hicks writes: ‘We shall never know if they could have found 100 for her 100th birthday which she was already keenly planning – but we rather think they would have.’ Throughout her life Mary travelled extensively. She journeyed throughout pre-war Europe and, in later years, to East Africa and China. She also visited her relations in South Africa on numerous occasions. One of them recalls: ‘Mary’s travels were not restricted to major centres or the usual tourist destinations as she always tended to make friends in out of the way places. She was an adventurous sort and in her sixties she climbed Table Mountain – I was most taken by how dainty her climbing boots were.’ For her 80th birthday she went to Kenya with her close friend and long-term travelling companion, Ena Burton. She was disappointed not to have the intended ascent in a hot air balloon owing to the weather conditions, and had to settle for visiting a bar which straddled the equator. 92

Mary ﬁrst visited the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford in 1935 and was later made a Patron of what had become the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). In November 2010 she was invited as a guest of honour to the newly refurbished building. She subscribed to a seat which has a small plaque inscribed with her name and that of her close friend and helper, Charles King-Smith. Mary continued to be a regular attendee, well known to many members of the audience and staﬀ alike as she attended every new RSC production. Mary had many interests, being an outstanding watercolour artist, gardener, conservationist and embroiderer. A very keen motorist, she joined the Riley Motor Club in 1955. In 1970 she purchased a Riley Kestrel from Grays Garage in Warwick, and they maintained it for the rest of her life. In fact the garage staﬀ cleared their showroom to hold a party for Mary’s 99th birthday. She would have been delighted to know that at her funeral service Charles King-Smith drove her car to the crematorium and it was parked outside the Chapel during the service. A. D. Oldershaw, her cousin, writes of Mary: ‘She was of my father’s generation and therefore rather more of a distant aunt. She was always slightly shrouded in mystery, which was heightened by her family reputation of being a formidable ‘blue stocking’. When we got to know her better in our later life we realised that this reputation was well deserved. However, we also learnt that she had an acute sense of humour and loved theatre, nature, radical politics, wine, conservation, literature, embroidery, local history, motoring, travelling and, most of all, people. She had a thirst for acquiring knowledge and experience – and then sharing both, particularly with young people. She was of that disappearing generation of women who totally dedicated their lives to teaching in its highest and broadest sense.’ We are grateful to Mary’s cousin, A. D. Oldershaw, her friend, Charles King-Smith, and Dorothy Hicks, from the Leamington College Association, for their contributions to this obituary.

Angela Sellers, 1922–2012 Angela Laurie Sellers – née Jukes – came up to LMH from Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Barnet in 1941 to study French and German. It being war-time, her degree was compressed to two years, but almost immediately on her arrival Angela began a lifelong friendship with Helen Anderson (née Blakie), Elizabeth Mackie (née Pedlow) and 93

Pamela Thickness (née Salmon), and they were collectively known as HEAP. Angela made the most of her time at LMH, playing tennis and enjoying her role as President of the JCR in her second year. There was no running water in rooms in those days and they were heated by coal ﬁres. Coal was rationed, so HEAP often shared each other’s ﬁres in the evenings, drinking cocoa, toasting bread and talking into the small hours. Any left-over cheese was allowed to go mouldy and passed on to the labs where penicillin was in its embryonic stage. Each afternoon in the grounds of LMH Land Girls supervised the growing of vegetables. Blackout curtains were drawn carefully each evening and there was no street lighting. When cycling at night the front light of the bicycle had to be hooded, showing only a thin slit of light which could create a hair-raising experience for the cyclist. Oxford views were uncluttered by today’s vehicles and there were occasional privileged sightings of C. S. Lewis cycling across the city. From LMH Angela went into the WRNS, where she became a Petty Oﬃcer, followed by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), where she helped to reunite broken families at the end of the war and appointed an up-and-coming barrister – Jo Grimond. In 1946 Angela married Norman (Norrie) Sellers (Hertford College) who became a barrister on the Northern Circuit and later a County Court Judge based in Preston. Angela was appointed as a JP and sat in Liverpool and Kirkby on the Juvenile Bench. During the 1960s she was bringing up four daughters while working part-time as an Adoptions Oﬃcer for Liverpool Social Services. Angela’s commitment to public and voluntary service also led to her serving on the Liverpool Executive Council before joining the newly formed Sefton Area Health Authority after the reorganisation in the 1970s. Angela and Norrie were active in the Liberal Party – Angela became known in Seaforth for the help she Angela Sellers gave to council house tenants and 94

she enthusiastically backed Norrie’s attempt to become a Liberal MP in Crosby in 1964. In 1979 Angela and Norrie moved to Knowle Green near Preston and Angela joined the Preston bench. She later took on the additional role of Chairman of the Lancashire Probation Committee, which gave her opportunities to campaign for improvements to the Probation Service at the highest level of the Home Oﬃce until her retirement at the age of 70. Angela had eight grandchildren and two great-granddaughters who gave her enormous pleasure and who found in her a ready ear, a great sense of humour, an insatiable appetite for new knowledge and discussion, and loving, wise counsel. Her fondness for LMH inspired one granddaughter (myself ) to take up a place here, joined the following year by a grandson (Huw Davies). Simultaneously a third granddaughter studied at St Catherine’s College. Following a serious stroke, Angela moved into residential care, regaining much of her mobility through determined eﬀort. She maintained her enthusiasm for listening to Radio 4, reading The Times, writing letters and attending family gatherings, and continued to inﬂuence her surroundings through democratic methods at the residents’ meetings in her care home. During her last 14 months she suﬀered a gradual decline in her health which she bore with fortitude, always wanting to know how and when she would regain her previous better health. Sadly she died in her Lancaster nursing home on 5 January 2012. Angela’s great friend, Liz, who shared those war years with her at LMH, describes Angela as ‘beautiful of face and beautiful of character’. Nuala Todd (2002 Physics) Thanks to Liz Mackie and Pam Thickness who contributed their memories of their time at LMH with Angela.

Constance Mary Pack (née Gillam), 1922–2010 Connie (as she was always known) was born in Oxford and attended East Oxford Primary School. From there she won a County Scholarship to Oxford High School for Girls and excelled academically, winning prizes for mathematics throughout her school life. She was appointed Head Girl in 1940 and in 1941 she won an Open Scholarship in mathematics at Lady Margaret Hall. It was war-time, and along with other 95

students she ‘dug for victory’ in the College. In 1944 she obtained First Class Honours in mathematics. Following graduation she spent a term teaching mathematics in Channing School, a private school evacuated from London to Ross-on-Wye, but she had been oﬀered an Assistant Lectureship at University College, Dundee in the University of St Andrews, and she was able to take up this post in January 1945. Besides teaching undergraduates she enrolled as a research student and worked under C. A. Coulson. With him, she published a research paper in 1948 in Vol. 62 of the Proceedings A of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In January 1947 Donald Pack arrived to join the staﬀ of the mathematics department and in November of the same year they were married, in Gilﬁllan Memorial Church, Dundee. They celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary in 2007. Connie did not derive much satisfaction from her research work and in 1950, in September of which year her son John was born, she retired from university work and devoted herself to family life. In 1951–2 her husband was given permission to accept an invitation to the University of Maryland. The family of three spent nine months away, returning to Britain only to move to Manchester for one year, during which her husband was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Technical College, Glasgow (later to become the University of Strathclyde). In 1953 the family took up residence in Bearsden, near Glasgow, and she and Donald lived there for the rest of their long life together. Alan was born in 1954 and Catherine in 1956. The three children of the marriage and six grandchildren survive Connie. Connie oﬀered a home to her parents when they were no longer able to look after Connie Pack, numbered 54, in the 1941 themselves, so for a time she matriculation photograph 96

cared for three adults and three children. She showed tremendous love and courage at that time. This period of her life lasted, in all, nine years, after which she decided that she had been too long away to return to university work, so she attended Jordanhill College, Glasgow, to obtain a secondary school teaching qualiﬁcation (a qualiﬁcation being necessary in Scotland). She taught in three schools, the last being Jordanhill College School, in Glasgow, which is, as the name suggests, associated with the College where Connie took her training. Connie retired in 1980, Donald in 1982. They liked to have holidays where they could walk among hills and woods and they particularly liked Austria, and especially Igls, a village in the mountains above Innsbruck, which they visited many times in their retirement. Connie was very intelligent, but also very modest, self-eﬀacing and kind. She was brought up in the Anglican church, but joined the Church of Scotland when she moved to Bearsden, and worshipped in Bearsden South Church (now Bearsden Cross Church), and attended the Woman’s Guild regularly. She was much liked and respected. For 35 years she delivered the church’s monthly magazine to her district, and always on the day of issue. She volunteered for special collections and delivery of notices. Around 1982 she fell victim to rheumatoid arthritis which eventually aﬀected her mobility, but she obtained remission from its worst eﬀects through appropriate treatment until 2009 when the medicine became less eﬀective. She entered hospital in September 2009 and declined steadily, ﬁnally losing all mobility and speech, but she bore it all bravely until her death on 24 October 2010, aged 88. She is very sadly missed. Professor D. C. Pack, Connie’s husband

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Book Reviews Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times by Sarah Bradford. Viking, 2010, £20 Sarah Bradford’s latest book, written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee, is aptly titled. This is not a biography which explores psychological development of the now familiar ‘tell all’ genre; it is more of the ‘what happened when’ variety, and as such it gives us a concise account of our times. Reading through it is like putting hundreds of newsreels on fast forward or ﬂicking through newspaper archives. The Queen has always seemed to be close to the centre of events over the last 80 years, whether as a fresh faced, shy young girl in wartime Britain, the newly crowned Head of State, or the stalwart public servant and matriarch of later years. Sarah Bradford pays tribute to the Queen’s devotion to that duty expressed in a speech in South Africa on her 21st birthday: ‘I declare that my whole life . . . shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great Imperial family.’ This is the thread of the narrative, and her devotion to the Commonwealth, her fearless attendance at independence celebrations, her lengthy world tours, her wise handling of political change and family crisis are recurring themes. Interspersed in the rather breathless summary of events – the end of the war takes only two pages, prime ministers come and go – are fascinating nuggets of information. The account of the Duke of Windsor knitting a blue sweater for Wallis Simpson as he watched his brother’s coronation, the machinations of Lord Mountbatten to change the Windsor name, the background to Anthony Blunt’s staying in post as Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures when his involvement with spying for the Russians was already known, or the incredibly amateur arrangements of 1961 to alert the PM, should he be out of London, in the event of a nuclear attack (using the AA network!), are examples. Visiting Heads of State found the Queen informed, enquiring and concerned. ‘Well informed about everything . . . her judgements on people and events were as clear cut as they were thoughtful, no one was more preoccupied by the cares and problems of our storm tossed age’ (De Gaulle). Her prime ministers – now numbering 12 – were devoted to her, with Wilson claiming a particularly friendly relationship. Heath 98

remarked on her absolute discretion, Callaghan on her professionalism and Winston simply adored her. Sarah Bradford analyses how public perception of the monarchy changed with the decision to allow television and the media more intimate access to the royal family and, while suggesting that this has somehow removed the mystique of the monarchy, does not herself fall into the populist trap. The divorce and tragic death of Diana are written of brieﬂy, with tact and sympathy, while other family disappointments are passed over in a paragraph or two. This book ends on a bright note. The queen’s constancy, her calm detachment and sheer ‘niceness’ have strengthened her position and held the family together. She has responded in full to the admonition of her mother in the early years of the war: ‘Always do the right thing . . . and remember to keep your temper and your word, and be loving.’ For those who like to look back, and perhaps even recall moments in their own lives – she visited LMH in 1960 with our Visitor, Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor – this is an easily read, well-researched book, written with characteristic verve and charm. Anne Simor (Crowe 1958 Modern Languages) The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination by Fiona MacCarthy. Faber and Faber, 2011, £25 ‘I get to work with reluctance at 10, wish I was dead at eleven, get hungry at 12, and all the rest of the day wish I was a gentleman and hadn’t to paint.’ Edward Burne-Jones’s description of what the working day feels like will strike a chord with many of us, especially those who (unlike him) are rarely engaged in the creation of masterpieces. He didn’t always feel like this, of course. Writing to Frances Graham in 1883, while painting King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, he repeated the anxious view that it was a mistake for him to have become an artist but added, ‘Yet I’d die if I wasn’t one.’ Did he love painting or hate it? Was he a self-doubting recluse or a conﬁdent public ﬁgure? Catching the curiously contradictory qualities of Burne-Jones’s personality is the key achievement of Fiona MacCarthy’s important new biography. In part, as she shows, he remained the lower-middleclass Birmingham boy whose mother had died in childbirth: provincial, 99

needy, and neurotic. With another side of the self, he could be assertive and endearing: a close friend of most of the leading artists of his era, a popular (though for the most part very proper) ladies’ man, and a much lionised diner-out with the great and good of late Victorian society. His nephew Rudyard Kipling remembered ‘the strength and the power and the jests’. Another nephew, Stanley Baldwin, claimed that he had ‘a will like iron and granite where the ideals he worked for were concerned’. The troubling private processes of artistic creation went hand in hand with the public self-assurance of artistic genius. Building on biographical foundations laid in 1904 by Georgiana Burne-Jones and in 1975 by Penelope Fitzgerald, Fiona MacCarthy has consulted hundreds of the artist’s excellent but still scattered letters to create an unprecedentedly full account of his remarkable career. The references to the wider Victorian context are sometimes uncertain (there is a very unhelpful account of the Eastern Question of the 1870s) and I think Fitzgerald was better on the paintings. But the handling of BurneJones’s work as a decorative artist, and of his personal life, is sensitive and acute. My chief reservation is not about the book’s contents but about its titles. The subtitle, ‘Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination’ is a gesture towards a topic which is simply too big for a biography. The imaginative quality of Burne-Jones’s work is demonstrated very eﬀectively. But the general or collective ‘Imagination’ to which he was contributing is scarcely touched on here. As for the primary title, it seems to me doubly misleading. When Burne-Jones died in 1898 he was not, in any literal sense, the ‘last’ Pre-Raphaelite. Three of the men who (unlike him) had been members of the original 1848 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood outlived him, with Frederick Stephens dying in 1907, Holman Hunt in 1910, and William Michael Rossetti not until 1919. Thomas Matthews Rooke, a gifted painter and designer who sometimes worked with Burne-Jones as his studio assistant, was living in Bedford Park until he died (at the age of 100) in 1942. As for the poets, Richard Watson Dixon survived to 1900 and Swinburne to 1909. Even Ruskin outlived Burne-Jones, not dying until 1900. If that seems like pedantry, there is also a more serious issue here – which arises from the use of the term ‘Pre-Raphaelite’. One of the great strengths of this book is the careful way in which it maps the shift in the late 1850s, by members of the Rossetti circle, from Pre-Raphaelite medievalism to the new mode of Aestheticism. MacCarthy shows 100

how Burne-Jones’s trips to Italy in 1859 and 1862 contributed to the establishment of a new artistic identity as a key contributor to the Aesthetic Movement. Burne-Jones was, in part, a Pre-Raphaelite. But he wasn’t just a Pre-Raphaelite, and he certainly wasn’t the last of them. It is a pity that the titles should do less than justice to this rich, original and enjoyable book. Nicholas Shrimpton Emeritus Fellow Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights by Marina Warner. Chatto and Windus, 2011, £28 ‘The unstudied products of untutored minds,’ says the Introduction to the 1957 Penguin Classics edition of Aladdin and Other Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. If anyone today thinks that is so, or that the stories in the Arabian Nights are primarily for children, Marina Warner’s immensely wide-ranging new study, which grows out of her recent work on myths and fantastic writing, should make them think again. Ever since the ﬁrst translations were published in the early eighteenth century, the stories have been enjoyed and imitated by a host of highly sophisticated readers (Voltaire is more the rule than the exception) and have boosted fantastical ways of feeling and imagining that have been a major component in Western culture since ancient times. Marina Warner stresses that irrational elements in ourselves and our culture have, if anything, burgeoned in modern times, for all the eﬀorts of Enlightenment reason to disperse or repress them – video gaming and Harry Potter being striking contemporary manifestations. She discusses a host of writers, artists, ﬁlm-makers and thinkers, some now barely known, but all fascinating, who have played a part in the prolonged ‘eﬄorescence’ (as she calls it) of the irrational in Western culture, with its recurrent moves both towards and away from the culture of the Nights. But she does much more than compile a survey: via the Nights she wants to revalidate the way fantasy may lead to forms of truth. Borrowing a phrase from Borges, she argues that the ‘reasoned imagination’ can have a moral as well as a playful or aesthetic dimension. This may sound like wish-fulﬁlment, but is given substance by her book’s main thematic charge: again and again the Arabian Nights have proved a 101

meeting place for East and West. Neither of course is really a monolithic bloc, but in the imaginative space of the Nights tensions and negative myths have constantly been defused and recast, not least because the Nights themselves seem to sidestep any institutionalised (male) power, literary or political. There is no single author, no agreed original text and most interpreters invent rather than analyse. The ﬁrst translator, Antoine Galland, may well have been the author of the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba, neither of which derives from a secure Arabic version. For an enormous number of subsequent readers, whether naïve or sophisticated, the stories have provided comparable springboards into imaginative creativity. It is a practice which Marina Warner herself warmly endorses and participates in. She builds her book around 15 of the stories, each engagingly summarised, and each leading into an often amazing gallimaufry (another of her words) of commentary and discussion, absorbing up-to-date scholarship, intellectual enthusiasm and personal feeling and experience. The broad lines are chronological, but at any given moment you may be as pleasurably unsure where you are going as you are with the stories themselves. A tour de force comes in the last main chapter which starts with Aladdin’s magic bed, stops oﬀ at a Boccaccio story, synthesises a history of the word ‘sofa’ and then passes on to a quite detailed description of Freud’s couch and the interplay between weaving texts or dreams and weaving the Irano-Turkish carpet that is its covering and itself evokes the threatened culture of a much troubled region. Like Shahrazad’s story-telling, Marina Warner’s own interplay between East and West is an invitation to potentially endless imaginative exploration of what she calls on her ﬁnal page ‘another side of the culture cast as the enemy and an alternative history to vengeance and war’. Peter Hainsworth Emeritus Fellow The Essential Petrarch: edited and translated with an introduction by Peter Hainsworth. Hackett, 2010, £12.95 A crucial chapter in the history of Western love poetry and early humanism, Petrarch’s extensive corpus, with its tantalizing expression of a desire caught between fulﬁlment and frustration, has fascinated the English-speaking world for several centuries. From Chaucer’s Canticus 102

Troili to Wyatt’s ‘translations’ (rewritings, recreations) of Petrarch and beyond, the question of what constitutes ‘Petrarch in English’ has been a matter of continued interest and debate. Peter Hainsworth’s The Essential Petrarch is a distinctive and most welcome addition to a growing library of modern English translations and anthologies, for both its readability and its judicious handling of its texts and themes. Alongside around a third of Petrarch’s vernacular lyrics from the Canzoniere, and his Triumph of Eternity, the anthology incorporates Book 3 of Petrarch’s most famous Latin work, the Secretum, as well as ﬁve letters, also originally in Latin, selected for the reciprocal light they shed on Petrarch’s personal and literary development, and especially a self shaped in the fabric of language and desire. Hainsworth’s introduction eloquently and engagingly ushers the reader into this and other features of Petrarch’s universe as it discusses his personal and emotional life, political and poetic careers. Petrarch’s itinerant lifestyle reads as a hallmark of the ﬁrst ‘modern’ man as well as of the transience that accompanied him in almost every area of his life, and became a privileged thematic of his writing. In the notes to individual texts, Hainsworth’s editorial style is deft and precise. He provides illuminating reﬂections on the indeterminacy of several lines and images, preserving meaning as possibility while indicating the bounds within which it ranges. As in the whole of Petrarch’s world, things are hardly ever deﬁnitive, but they are far from abstract. Hainsworth’s exemplary translations of the Canzoniere stand alone, without facing Italian text, indicating that they are meant to be read as free-standing poems: English ‘versions’ of Petrarch, which give primacy to his meaning, even where the ‘music, […] the polyphonic texture created by diction, rhythm and rhyme’ cannot be reproduced exactly (p. xxxi). His use of unrhymed iambic pentameters to render Petrarch’s rhymed hendecasyllables, combined with the middle register English he employs throughout the anthology, allow him to skillfully recreate the pattern of a mind reﬂecting incessantly on itself, debating, analysing, but only occasionally ﬁnding the refuge from restlessness that it seeks in the formal equilibrium of the text. A supreme moment of reprieve and self-gathering occurs in the Triumph of Eternity, but its linguistic proximity to the Canzoniere suggests time is suppressed more than conquered. The conﬂict between order and disorder is present in a diﬀerent way in Petrarch’s Secretum, an engaging work, especially in Hainsworth’s 103

translation, composed of two voices – Augustine and Franciscus – each of which embodies some essential facet of Petrarch’s identity. Book 3 reads almost like a medieval version of a therapy session: Augustine is paternal but chiding; Franciscus is ultimately compliant but, crucially, defers any resolve to change until a later time – another conversation, a diﬀerent encounter. The anthologized letters that follow represent just so many moments of engagement with other possible worlds. They open up the collection towards history, geography, and empire, and the myth of Rome as Petrarch’s private sphere, while it remains intact, adapts to public pressures and concerns. If there is tension in constraining an author whose self-image is constantly shifting among these multiple re-presentations into a more monolithic, ‘essential’ grouping, like so many tensions in Petrarch, it is presented more to be explored than overcome. Petrarch’s admission in canzone 264, ‘I fear to keep | assembling what a moment will disperse’, resonates with the whole of his artistic project and its anxiety of order and selection. If something of the ‘patterning and architecture’ of the original collection has been lost (p. xxv), nonetheless the ghosts of missing poems, the suggestions of other texts that might have been included, conserve the original play between presence and absence, fragmentation and synthesis. As Hainsworth remarks, it is apt, even poetically just, that any translator of Petrarch should risk encountering the ‘distance, loss, and frustration’ (p. xxxiii) that is a hallmark of his poetry and shadows even the most positive articulations of the self and its desires. If translating Petrarch is indeed a labour of love, reading him, where his voice is conveyed with the depth and energy it has here, remains a constant source of fascination and delight. Francesca Southerden (1997 Modern Languages, Somerville College) Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend by Diana Athill. Granta, 2011, £20 These marvellous letters, which were all written by Diana Athill to the American poet Edward Field, leap oﬀ the page in all their spontaneity and aﬀection, ﬁlled with sparkling intelligence, literary gossip, and also the exasperations and frustrations of day-to-day life. Their correspond104

ence extends from 1981, when she was still the editor of our times, at André Deutsch, to 2007. Instead of a Book, handsomely produced by Granta, makes you wish that you, too, had a friend who might write such letters, so full of life and candour, excitement, honesty, sensitivity, and aﬀection – even while you know that email has wiped this sort of exchange almost from existence. Diana Athill describes herself as ‘beady eyed’, a sharp observer of life from the sidelines, and that certainly saves her letters from sentimentality. But what makes these letters so fascinating for a wider, public audience is watching her transition from sharp editor and observer of life and literary ﬁgures, to her surprised participation on the literary scene as she herself becomes famous as a writer. With the publication of Stet, her memoir about the publishing world, we follow its progress from the ﬁrst hesitant chapters to ﬁnal acclaim. From then on, her letters are ﬁlled with surprise and delight, and even royalty cheques. Stet is a brilliant account of her 40 years at André Deutsch, where she handled diﬃcult literary stars such as Jean Rhys, John Updike, Norman Mailer, V. S. Naipaul and Alfred Chester, the now forgotten, mad and promising poet friend who brought Field and Athill together. She co-founded the publishing house with André Deutsch, and was somehow cheated by him of the acclaim, the ﬁnancial rewards, even the pension, that should have been her due (despite his promise to ‘look after her’). He occasionally fobs her oﬀ with a generous but patronising cheque, for something like dentistry, and considers he has done well by her. In part, this is a reﬂection of the role of working women in the 1950s, but the exploitation continued all his life. She refers to him (quite justiﬁably) as ‘the old monster’. Luckily, just as the libel lawyers are poring over the manuscript of Stet, he dies. She is too generous to maintain the rancour that, as an ever more indignant reader, one feels was his due. She lived with the Jamaican playwright Barry Record in a complex, and increasingly demanding relationship, and their one child did not survive. There are wry references to their joint struggle to keep their old typewriter on the road, as ribbons become extinct and they are overtaken by overwhelming, baﬄing and prohibitively expensive new technology. It was sad to read Record’s obituaries just as I was writing this review, and good that his most famous play, Skyvers, had two recent revivals just before his death. In fact, as Diana’s star rose, his waned, and this may be 105

the reason that she is so modest about the success of her next memoirs, Yesterday Morning and Somewhere Towards the End. In her 80s – and now her 90s – she describes enjoying the things entailed by success – giving talks, being interviewed, meeting well-known people – because I have discovered that I am good at it, but all the time a tiny inner voice . . . is whispering ‘You’re showing oﬀ’ – and in my childhood ‘showing oﬀ’ was the worst thing you could do next to lying.

There is no ‘showing oﬀ’ in these letters, which illuminate and amplify her unique experience of literary life. I read that at a recent literary festival the speaker’s introduction went: ‘Please welcome Diana Athill, OBE, OMG!’ OMG, indeed. Stacy Marking (Waddy 1956 English) The Queen’s Godson: Sir John Harington of Kelston, 1560-1612 by Antonia Southern. Academica Press, 2011, £71.95 Sir John Harington of Kelston (1560–1612) is best known today for his invention of the water-closet, forerunner of modern sanitation, and his pioneering translation into English of the Italian poet Ariosto’s epic romance Orlando Furioso. Harington was baptised at All Hallows London Wall on 4 August 1560. An old Etonian and Cambridge graduate, he was known to his contemporaries as a landowner, author–translator, courtier and wit. To his godmother Queen Elizabeth, who could recall his father at the court of Henry VIII, Harington was known rather more brusquely as ‘boy Jack’. Perhaps she remembered that while he was at Eton, he and his schoolfriends had translated into Latin the story of Elizabeth’s suﬀerings under her half-sister Mary Tudor, as recorded in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. When the queen sent him a copy of her 1576 end-of-session speech to the assembled Lords and Commons in Parliament, she noted that ‘such striplings’ as he was, could not be admitted as yet to parliamentary assemblies, but if he studied her words with care, he might ﬁnd ‘some good fruits hereof ’. Elizabeth was hinting that she saw in him a future public servant in the mould of privy councillors such as Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham. Antonia Southern’s biography traces Harington’s diverse career and notes his independ106

ence of mind, which tended to shrivel the ‘good fruits’ that might have dropped into his lap. He refused to subscribe to the 1584 bond of association, against Mary Queen of Scots and all her followers, because he thought it might prejudice the claims of James VI of Scotland, Mary’s son and Elizabeth’s most likely heir. His 1591 translation of the whole of Ariosto’s vast and bawdy Orlando Furioso, which made his literary name, may have been a penance imposed on him by the straitlaced queen for circulating a part of his initial manuscript among her impressionable young maids of honour. The poem and its translator are obliquely referred to by Shakespeare in As You Like It. Harington disliked the extreme religious pigeonholing of individuals that marked post-Reformation England, hence his much quoted description of himself as neither papist, nor protestant, nor puritan. He oﬀered the famous water-closet as a gift to the élite of the Elizabethan regime. One was installed at Richmond Palace for the queen; Sir Robert Cecil accepted one for Cecil House, his new mansion in the Strand, and later stood as godfather to Harington’s son, born in 1602 and named Robert. However, Lord Burghley, always distrustful of newfangled ideas, declined the oﬀer of a water-closet at his great mansion of Theobalds despite Harington’s oﬀer to supervise its installation personally. He may also have been wary of Harington as a long-term friend and supporter of the glamorous military leader and royal favourite the Earl of Essex. Some three years after Burghley’s death in 1598, Essex attempted to raise a rebellion in London, to the horror of Harington, who noted sombrely in his private writings that he ‘had nearly been wrecked on the Essex coast’. Despite this frightening experience, Harington in December 1602 wrote what is probably his most notable political work, a tract on the rightful claim of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne. He sent it to the king just as Elizabeth was beginning to show signs of ill-health, but it was nevertheless a very rash gesture: if the queen had recovered, Harington would probably have been banished from court. In fact, James VI formed much the same estimate of Harington as the queen had done. Despite acknowledging his literary talents, the king never gave Harington any oﬃce, and it is possible that the views Harington seems to have espoused in his last year, on the necessity for a separation between church and state, were just too radical for a king who gloried in his new role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Antonia Southern has written a readable and insightful study of this immensely able, complex yet somehow slightly ﬂaky ﬁgure 107

whose literary talents were widely recognised but who never achieved his goal of a serious political career. Pauline Croft (1962 History) Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems, with parallel German text by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland. Oxford University Press, 2011, £10.99 This is a masterly introduction to the poetry of an author who, as the preface reminds us, ‘manifested a particularly acute form of the cultural malaise of rootlessness, restlessness, and unease that dominated the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ following Nietzsche’s proclamation of the ‘death of God’ and the cataclysm of the First World War. Yet this selection by Susan Ranson (Mills, 1956) and Marielle Sutherland presents him not merely as a morbidly neurotic or self-indulgent spinner of words, but as a widely read, disciplined and cultivated poet. Reading these poems, one is constantly aware of Rilke’s nature as a European in the widest sense who corresponded with Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva and maintained a lifelong fascination with Slavonic as well as northern and western European culture and literature. The volume opens with two choices from his early collection Larenopfer (Oﬀerings to the Lares), in which he acknowledges his roots as a member of Prague’s German-speaking community and the inﬂuences which ﬁrst shaped his development as a writer. There is a generous selection from Das Stundenbuch (The Book of Hours); the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus are presented in full, with a representative and welljudged assortment of poems, both familiar and uncollected, to round out our appreciation of his evolution and achievements. The skill and sensitivity with which these selections were made is equalled by the quality of the translations themselves. It is invaluable to have the German text matched line for line by the English versions, which reﬂect the patterns and metres of the original, although the translators, almost inevitably, cannot always reproduce Rilke’s complex rhyme-schemes. They rise admirably, however, to the challenges of lines such as his evocation of the ‘blasse, bleiche / frühlingfrierende Birke’

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(pale / spring-cold, spring-wind trembling birch) to create versions which make genuinely poetic reading in their own right. This edition also comes equipped with a wealth of excellent and thoughtful notes which anticipate the potential diﬃculties for those new to Rilke of penetrating his intense and concentrated tropes of expression without patronizing or confusing the reader. There are detailed comments on the individual poems which not only identify dedicatees and mythological or literary references, but explain obscure points of imagery while leaving room for the reader’s own interpretations. This thorough commentary to a ﬂuent and graceful translation is at once a tribute to one of the greatest and most genuinely European poets of the twentieth century and an invaluable introduction to his work, both for those privileged to be able to read it in the original and others who have yet to discover it for the ﬁrst time. Susan Halstead (Reynolds 1972 Lit Hum) Behind the Lines by Chris Considine. Cinnamon Press, 2011, £7.99 I have very much enjoyed Chris Considine’s ﬁne fourth collection, Behind the Lines. Her language is alive and deft, her visual sense very strong. And for me, among the poems’ outstanding qualities is their ability to make you see things ‘from inside’, to inhabit the mind of someone, or to throw a fresh, particular and sometimes strange light on what is happening – and this is true both of her lighter poems and her more deeply felt, serious ones. So, in the playful and sharply observed ‘Paradise Lost at the Lipstick Factory’, she is reading Paradise Lost in her lunch hour on a holiday job – ‘Story of angels and abstractions’ among smokers and chattering girls. The improbable jumble of Milton and cosmetics is funny and cleverly developed. We are right in the scene: ‘Down the travelling belt the little waxy pillars / process like something serious’. ‘On they glide, to pass / through gates of purifying ﬂame that gloss them / to symbols of desire – all your fault, Eve . . .’ In one of her more serious poems,‘River’, she wonders what might have been in a boy’s mind as he was drowning: ‘Did he, underwater, see light / ﬁltering down, a yellowish gloom, / or did he enter the

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cloister of roots / with eyes closed and a smile, conscious of / the girl on the bank ...’ Chris Considine’s honesty about her own feelings can bring a sense of recognition: in her sequence ‘Ill Winter’, which describes being treated for breast cancer in painful detail, there is a sense of time standing still – it is winter outside and images of cold pervade the poem. In the ﬁnal part, ‘Signs of Spring’, she has come through, and writes about reentering ordinary life: ‘Is she nostalgic / for silence even when the ﬁrst lapwings / squeal and tumble about the brownish hill? . . . / the year keeps moving on its loop / same sounds round and round . . .’ She uses sequences skilfully for more extended explorations, some narrative (‘Ill Winter’, and the title poem, ‘Behind the Lines’, based on her father’s wartime letters), others with more thematic links. For me, among the strongest of these is ‘Ghost Sonnets’, a sequence of love sonnets in which the language is often simple, the intense feeling in this late-in-life love, ghost-love, movingly expressed: ‘But then without warning / there comes a lunge of the heart, a piercing. / I have not got you and never had you.’ Her poems about her mother in old age, confused and going blind, are very poignant. The delicate and slightly mysterious ‘Blind Light’ is about her mother’s near blindness but also her own sense of her mother disappearing from sight ‘receding, / metamorphosing into cloud . . .’. In ‘Valediction’ she is scattering her mother’s ashes. The opening is simple, the visual and emotional impact very strong: Midsummer’s Day. Labouring uphill (blue sky) like Aeneas with his father Anchises (easterly breeze) I am carrying her on my back. How can her ashes be so heavy when she has become so little . . .

There are many more poems to celebrate. I will end with ‘Going Back’, about returning, later in life to stay in College, in ‘this place of endless beginnings’, and her tumult of feelings: I greet my ghosts among fallen petals on every pavement: young ghosts of friends, lovers, dead or lost, and those I should have met then, when there was time, and never did.

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Wasteland: The Thief Within, by Mary Corran. Strategic Book Group, 2011, $18.95 Mary Corran has up to now ostensibly had a life in two parts: until 1995, at 42, she was a successful stockbroker and writer of fantasy novels; from 1995 she suﬀered a severe depressive illness from which she struggled to survive. Just recently, since the mid-2000s, she has managed to create a new and diﬀerent existence. This courageous book is a detailed account of her diﬃcult journey to a more balanced mind. My standpoint as a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist inevitably informs my reading of such a story. There are undoubted beneﬁts in professionals seeing mental ill health from the other side. I was humbled and fascinated by the intense and brutally candid way she reveals the feelings her illness subjected her to and the behaviour it led her into. I found myself wishing to know how some of my patients and their connections would receive her account. It is a dark tale and, though this may be professional over-caution, I might hesitate to oﬀer it to someone in the early throes of a depressive illness, as Mary’s was particularly severe and long lasting. It would be wrong to pretend hers is not a gruelling story, with its accurately chronicled ups and, more often, downs: admissions to grim wards, self-harm, self-hatred and suicide near-misses. But there are positive messages within it. There are some wonderful professionals, psychiatric nurses and doctors, working receptively and ﬂexibly in our mental health services. Mental illness suﬀerers like Mary may be able to change and indeed need to, but this has to be in their own time and ways, and both medication and therapists of all kinds are but adjuncts to this process. Mary’s perspectives are often thought-provoking: mental ill health comes from within (contributing to making it resistant to treatment). There is a sense of a ‘hidden’ self in her, existing from her earliest life, which possessed terribly self-destructive urges. She does not shy away from the sheer self-centredness of the depressive state of mind, which inevitably lays heavy, even intolerable burdens on those caring for sufferers. Her successful previous life supplied her with plenty of means, and she acknowledges the resultant advantages and choices denied to many depressives. In the early chapters of the book, perhaps an easier read than the detailed history of the illness following, she explores, free from dogma or blame, her back-story. Her character and later illness were shaped by the lives and personalities of her parents, academics seemingly unsuited 111

to parenthood. Manifest trauma or abuse were absent, but a central ‘proto-thought’, not I think fully articulated in her mind for a long time, is her conviction from childhood that her life was a mistake, that she had no valid place in the world. So her journey to some sort of inner peace was in a way seeking an ability to live with herself. On the way she has unsurprisingly discarded many of her old connections but she comes over as a person who basically likes others; truly it is only herself that she hates and despises. She makes new connections, perhaps the most important of all these being the beloved cats she dares to commit to as she recovers – her ‘furs’ as she quirkily calls them. The painful acceptance of limits to her recovery probably helps promote the return of some sort of balance in her mind, and bravely putting her story into the public arena in Wasteland may have played its part in her arrival at a more secure place. Nicola Hall (Padel 1970 Physiology) Understanding Religion and Spirituality in Clinical Practice by Margaret Clark. Karnac Books, 2011, £15.99 The Jungian school of psychoanalysis is known for the attention it pays to religion. Margaret Clark has put her years of serious thought and practice into this book, which is conceived of as providing not only something for the general reader but more speciﬁcally a ‘clinical monograph’ for practitioners in counselling and psychotherapy. They need this for two reasons. Most therapists will not be religious for the simple reason that this is a time when secular thinking prevails in most areas, not least education, and they may have given small attention to the matter. Second, there has been limited enthusiasm in the tradition which Freud began when he set oﬀ as a conquistador to take the light of nineteenth-century scientiﬁc rationalism into those areas previously mapped by philosophy, art and theology. But as Margaret Clark points out, Freud’s own interest in and knowledge of the function, nature and force of religion was profound, and her thesis is that we are all religious – that man is a religious animal whether he knows it or not. In this book she distinguishes between spirituality and religion. She thinks of spirituality as the search for meaning – perhaps the search for knowledge and the wish to know and be known. Religion she sees as the various forays we make into codifying and institutionalising the desire 112

to ﬁnd meaning in life; in these terms, people who have no religion and say so are simply deﬁning their spiritual stance. The book has a practical function in helping therapists, especially those who see openly religious patients, to think broadly and steadily not about whether they agree with their patients, but about the meaning of the religious beliefs the patient claims. Clark is at her most interesting when she points us in the direction of thinking that we all worship certain gods, and that those we worship unconsciously can be strongest of all. There are good gods and bad gods. For example, in her introduction she suggests that anorexia can be conceived of as a ‘dysfunctional spiritual system’; that is to say, the anorexic is ruled from within by a tyrannical and deadly god who demands absolute obedience. The governing law laid down is that it is wrong to eat and that it is better to die than to do so. This is the opposite of the truth; a perverse god reigns and requires the believer to give his being over to a lie. A brief review can only give pointers. Margaret Clark invites her readers to think and to read as widely as she herself has done, and the therapists at whom this series is aimed can only beneﬁt from the stimulus to their thought. Lisa Miller (Davies 1958 English) St John of the Cross by Peter Tyler. Continuum, 2010, £14.99 I approached this attractively presented book as I imagine many other readers might: with an interest in ﬁnding out more about St John of the Cross, but without much formal theological training. But, as many other readers may not, I came to it as a religious sister from a diﬀerent spiritual tradition (that of Ignatius of Loyola), and I was interested particularly in how John’s spirituality would be presented. What I found in the book was not quite what I imagined I would ﬁnd! Peter Tyler’s statement of intent to ‘preserve the otherness, rawness and sheer oddness of John’ comes early in the book and is oﬀered alongside his desire that the reader will ﬁnd her- or himself asking what sustained John in the varied events of his extraordinary life and why he aroused such controversy in his own lifetime and beyond. Tyler’s conclusion, that John can best be understood as a practical theologian, underpins the whole work. In the ﬁnal pages, Tyler says that in choosing John as his exemplar it follows that ‘theology is to be seen 113

as discipline that embraces the whole self: body, heart, mind and spirit’, a view with which I would be in heartfelt agreement. What feels more challenging to me is to ﬁnd a sense of ordinary human empathy for John, who although clearly gifted and remarkable, seems so far from being someone I could personally identify with. Tyler accepts this paradox and travels a wide range of disciplines in his examination of this unusual and enigmatic man, making full use of Auden’s description of him as ‘an Odd Ball in an Odd Country at an Odd Time’. John’s theology, in the rather more limited sense, is considered in some detail, as is his mysticism. However, the events of his life, his social and religious context within the Spanish Carmelite order of the sixteenth century, his poetic and artistic qualities, and his psychological insight are presented as equally signiﬁcant. The last chapters look at possible relationships between John’s writings and some strands in the traditions of Islam and Buddhism and, ﬁnally, at the relevance of John for those working today in the areas of spiritual direction and pastoral theology. The book includes some very specialised academic discussion – for example in chapter 6 about the work of the Priest-scholar of Arabic, Miguel Asín Palacios, and in the discussion in chapter 3 of John’s relationship to the writings of Dionysius and the tradition of theologia mystica. I will confess that I struggled somewhat at these points, feeling my lack of theological background quite acutely. It was with relief and enjoyment that I moved on to the less technical chapters. The contrast in styles and in the levels of specialist understanding needed left me wondering a little about the intended readership. There is a lot that will provide nourishment for many people in this book, but I think it is probably quite a small number who would be able to enjoy every course of the meal with equal relish! Sarah Dobson CJ (1978 PPE) The Return to the Mystical: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Teresa of Avila and the Christian Mystical Tradition by Peter Tyler. Continuum, 2011, £18.99 ‘What can be shown cannot be said.’ The arresting and beautiful cover of Dr Tyler’s book has images rarely seen together: above the title a monochrome photograph of Wittgen114

stein stares hauntedly outwards, below it in warm colours, stylised like an icon, a haloed St Teresa looks the other way. This clash of period and culture expresses the paradoxes of his project; words to approach experiences beyond words. He invites us to join him on an arduous journey that for him began 20 years ago. Plenty of signposts lead towards our meeting with the two great spirits, Wittgenstein and Teresa of Avila. Tyler’s analysis of ‘mystical performative discourse’, shows us their strategies to provoke and invite readers to stop, think and question for themselves. He makes a living connection between medieval saint and Viennese philosopher – a transformative experience to jolt us into seeing the world anew. When Wittgenstein says ‘I do philosophy like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again; now her spectacles, now her keys’, the insight comes through metaphor. Tyler takes us through deﬁnitions and debate about mysticism, its evolution in theologica mystica from Dionysius the Areopagite, to its medieval ﬂowering and the emergence of the Spanish School. Citations and references help us on our way through what has become a huge ﬁeld of ancient and modern theological and philosophical activity, translations and editions. Simple language, a persuasive, sometimes self-deprecating manner and metaphor are among the tools of both writers. An Inquisitor, seven years after her death, found Teresa’s work so beyond the capacity of a woman as to mark her as a heretic. Love and delight in the presence of God are her themes, an approachable style is of the essence. In ‘silence wherein the understanding is profoundly quieted . . . the love that unites supplies the want of words’. Wittgenstein was under ﬁre in two wars: ﬁve months at an observation post on the Russian front in the First World War and working humbly in a hospital during the Blitz. Tyler shows us from diary and notebook how he calls for God’s will to be done, seeks light in the nearness of death and values as a sign ﬁnding Tolstoy’s Brief Gospel, the book he carried everywhere (to the exasperation of Bertrand Russell), but which ‘kept me virtually alive’. In ‘A Concluding Unscientiﬁc Postscript’ Peter Tyler shakes oﬀ some scholarly burdens and reaches the real heart of his book, quoting Wittgenstein to his student Drury: ‘If you and I are to lead religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is diﬀerent.’

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For me this book has been hard to review, and a more worthwhile read than can be expressed brieﬂy. Margaret Bonﬁglioli (Slater 1954 English) The Faber Book of French Cinema by Charles Drazin. Faber (h/b), 2011, £25.00 In 1938, tired of mainstream cinema programmes at the local, my parents often travelled from Chiswick to the Academy cinema, Oxford Street, to see the ﬁlms of Jean Gabin (La bête humaine, Le Quai des Brumes) and Sacha Guitry. Gabin was their favourite actor. In 1968 I sought out Masculin Féminin and Baisers volés at the local university ﬁlm society. Jean-Pierre Léaud was an actor I could readily identify with (if only I were so cool!), conveying feelings of what it was like to be 19 in Paris in 1968. Gabin and Léaud conveyed a distinctively French mood of romantic fatalism, which is what both my father and I had responded to. In 1981, LMH undergraduate Charles Drazin took a short walk along Norham Road to visit Maison Française and discovered the ﬁlms of Eric Rohmer. Three short journeys all have in common the discovery of French cinema, which provided its own distinctive pleasures. Writing in an accessible style, Drazin commences with pioneers – the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Abel Gance, Charles Pathé, Léon Gaumont – names that live on today. He discusses government subsidies through Le Centre National du Cinéma to promote French culture, the signiﬁcance of Cahiers du Cinéma and the inﬂuence of French cinema on British directors Robert Hamer, Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson. A recurrent theme is the contrast between the ‘cinema of personal expression’ and ‘industrial product’. In the former category are intellectuals who found French ﬁlm culture welcoming. One was Jean Vigo, whose feature-length urban pastoral L’Atalante (1934) has been well documented in Marina Warner’s excellent BFI monograph. Others included Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson and Alain Resnais. In the UK of the 1950s, French ﬁlms such as La Ronde (1950) had a reputation for being slightly risqué. Most people only saw popular ﬁlms that were booked on the cinema circuits, titles such as Les vacances de M. Hulot, Le salaire de la peur, Riﬁﬁ, Les diaboliques, Le ballon rouge, Mon oncle, and Et Dieu . . . créa la femme. Brigitte Bardot was a phenomenon 116

of the era, and a precursor of the nouvelle vague which challenged established moral orthodoxies and ﬁlm practices. Drazin shows how Poil de carotte (1932) inﬂuenced the subject matter of Truﬀaut’s Les quatre cents coups (1959) and ﬁnds new wave antecedents in Le silence de la mer (1949), Bob le ﬂambeur (1956) and Le beau Serge (1958). The most iconic new wave ﬁlm, A bout de souﬄe (Godard, 1960), a total rejection of Cinéma de papa, used hand-held cameras and fast Tri-x ﬁlm stock in a French take on the US pulp thriller. A ﬁlm with attitude, it deﬁned the 1960s, depicting a new generation, the children of Marx and Coca Cola. Cinéma de papa was to return with a vengeance in 1986 with Jean de Florette and in the French heritage cinema of the 1990s. At its best, French cinema oﬀers a diﬀerent way of seeing, but can it retain its distinctive cultural identity when young French audiences are more into Luc Besson than Robert Bresson, and seem to prefer big budget US ﬁlms? Recent ﬁlms such as Irma Vep and Un prophète are targeted at international audiences, and with The Artist (2010, France/ Belgium) language is no barrier at all. Faced with a wide selection of French ﬁlms on internet websites, where do you start? This book would be a good place to commence an exploration of French culture and society through cinema. If you do not need sub-titles, French websites oﬀer even more possibilities. Roger Philip Mellor (1987 PGCE) Nemesis by Lindsey Davis. Century, 2010, £18.99 (h/b), £7.99 (p/b); Falco: the Oﬃcial Companion by Lindsey Davis. Century, 2010, £20.00 Nemesis begins with two deaths – deaths, not murders – which deeply aﬀect the characters we know and care for. It is diﬃcult after these events to return to the cheerful humour which generally characterises the Falco novels, though the author’s (and hero’s) sardonic touch and witty use of language are still notably present. The possibility of murder leads to a depressing and unproductive search in the malodorous and pestilential Pontine Marshes, a setting which adds to the pervasive sense of menace, as do the disgusting and murderous inhabitants of the marshes. The murders themselves are foul. Personal relationships are soured. Oﬃcialdom proves itself either corrupt or incompetent in deal117

ing with the situation and Falco himself displays a much darker side to his character than normal. This is not necessarily the last in the series, but at present the author has no plans for a future Falco novel. This may explain the plot and character developments which are wound up, some satisfactorily, some perhaps less so. Albia’s future career plans, for example, seem altogether foolhardy for a young girl and it is diﬃcult to believe that Falco would contemplate the dangers with such equanimity. With the rich cast of characters that the Falco opus has accumulated, it is unreasonable to be disappointed by the brief ‘farewell’ cameos of some of one’s favourites. Thalia the snake dancer makes only two short (though very important) appearances, and we never actually see Jason the sensitive python. Nor is it made clear what Aelianus has done to be saddled with such an unprepossessing wife and father-in-law. I fear that the author, like Helena Justina their sister, displays undue favouritism towards Justinus, the younger of the two Camilli brothers, who has been allowed to net and retain an heiress despite some very dodgy behaviour towards her. There are some brilliant set scenes: a funeral feast with the reading of a will containing an unexpected codicil (shades of Agatha Christie) and the excruciating dinner party hosted by Anacrites the Chief Spy, which is so socially embarrassing as to be actively painful. Falco’s problems in adjusting to newfound wealth are amusing. Davis can produce scenes of understated tenderness: the loving relationship between Falco and Helena has always been convincing. In contrast she can also sketch scenes of stark horror: not just the gruesome discovery of the bodies, but a tragic little chapter on the hopeless position, emotionally and practically, of the mother of one of the victims, whose murder, to make matters worse, was just an incidental aspect of the main case. The scenes of torture, when Falco and Petronius interrogate a suspect at some length, have worried many readers. However, the action does ﬁt into the storyline, and is described with restraint and little overt sadism. It disturbs the perpetrators as well as the victim. On the other hand, I was troubled by the special pleading which enables Falco and his associates to take the law into their own hands at the end of the novel. I thought the reasoning here was much less satisfactory than the logic of the plot development, which is, as usual, excellent. The story is gripping and the outcome logical. This is a very good book but a dark one. It was pleasant to turn to Falco: the Oﬃcial Companion to remind oneself of the lightness of touch more normal to the series. This is a much more amusing and interesting compilation than the usual guides 118

to a well-known author’s publications. To begin with it is written by Davis herself in her own idiosyncratic fashion and the book is prefaced by an illuminating section on the author’s background, writing and research. The Companion contains the expected synopses of each novel and brief articles on the most important characters, with some revelations on how the individual books and the series as a whole developed, and enticing hints that existing plots and characters might be utilised in the future. The notes on the relevant places in the Roman world, social customs, and political history, are interesting as well as useful, with snippets of unexpected information. It is fascinating to be given an insight into the thoughts of an author who has provided one with so much pleasure. I found it very satisfying, for instance, to see that Davis shares my own low opinion of Falco’s elder brother Festus, the ‘national hero’. One somehow expects authors to be seduced by the charming rogues whom they create. Davis clearly enjoys her characters but is fonder of some than of others and relishes the disposal of obnoxious villains. It is unusual to read a companion volume through from cover to cover; it is not their general function and would normally lead to increasing boredom. Instead I was really sorry to reach the end. There is a good index and the book is well and generously illustrated. There are maps and time-lines and interesting sections on unusual topics such as ‘Medicine, Dentistry and Contraception’. There are apposite quotations from classical authors and from the novels themselves. Even the dust jacket blurbs are witty. All in all a splendid and enjoyable book! Christina Mackwell (1964 History) King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher. Fourth Estate, 2011, £18.99 Having set his previous novel, The Northern Clemency, in the Sheﬃeld of his childhood and adolescence, Philip Hensher now takes his readers to the south-west of England, his home since he became Professor at the University of Exeter in 2005, for King of the Badgers, his seventh novel. He creates the town of Hanmouth, set on a Devon estuary, and populates it with a large number of characters ranging in age, class, politics, race and sexual orientation. The ﬁrst part, ‘Nothing to Hide’, reminded me of Under Milk Wood as Hensher takes us into the diﬀerent houses and shops of the town and gives us telling glimpses of the people 119

who live and work there. But unlike those of Dylan Thomas, perhaps, these pen portraits are not loving or warmly amusing. The characters are mainly unattractive in appearance, behaviour or attitudes. Hensher stings with his pen. From the ﬁrst page, we understand that something newsworthy has happened in Hanmouth, and in the third chapter Hensher sets this plot going: the disappearance of China, an eight-year-old girl from one of the poor estates on the outskirts of the town. To the largely middle-class characters whom we have already met, China’s mother is someone they would only know if she had happened to cut their hair. The plot-line of the child’s disappearance, with an apparent solution and then further twists, could have comfortably ﬁlled the pages of a standard crime novel. For Hensher, it is a slender steel wire that runs through the entire book but is rarely in the foreground. He writes it well and convincingly, as if to show us that he could master this genre of writing if he were so minded, but for him it is a diversion, not the main show. That seems to be a feature of Hensher’s writing – the pleasure he takes from trying out diﬀerent styles (there’s also the germ of a campus novel here, in the Lodge or Bradbury mould) or playing with viewpoint. It is as if the English language and its literature were stored in a great dressing-up box into which he cannot resist dipping. There are some terriﬁc set pieces in the novel – I think immediately of the Bears’ party – and some charming diversions, such as the anodyne blurbs that one character, David, writes for the back of bogus English novels sold to the Chinese youth market and destined to be carried as fashion statements. So if the crime story is not the point of King of the Badgers, then what is? For me it is an examination of how we exist alongside each other in society and how modern technology that was introduced to protect us – in particular CCTV, which watches grimly but unintelligently over Hanmouth – is clumsy and no substitute for sensitive human kindness. The three main sections of the novel are separated by two shorter ‘Impromptus’. In one, ‘The Omniscient Author Speaks’, Hensher follows Kenyon, perhaps the only major character always drawn sympathetically, on a journey which ends with the revelation of a secret. Throughout, Kenyon is watched by CCTV, and recorded by the devices on an ATM and a ticket machine. But although they track his movements, none of these devices captures the purpose and the ultimate joy of his journey. Incidentally, the journey ends with two lovers falling upon each other 120

in a hallway, unable to wait any longer; a parallel scene, elsewhere in the novel, between two characters whom Hensher views less sympathetically, appears ludicrous. One of Hensher’s most grotesque creations is the busybody John Calvin, who heads the local Neighbourhood Watch and takes it upon himself to mediate between China’s mother and the police and press. Since his mode of social discourse is to put on accents and speak in comic dialect, it is no surprise, but a very satisfactory conclusion, when we ﬁnd that the members of his Neighbourhood Watch, invited to sit around his table, are, like the dinner guests in Freddie Frinton’s classic Dinner for One, all imagined – from their accents down to their taste in confectionery. Like Kenyon’s daughter Hettie, who has created fantasy companions from 29 oddly named dolls, Calvin has invented his committee. Unlike Hettie, though, he uses his invention to assume power that he then abuses to get his own way with regard to surveillance. But the novel ends with scenes of human understanding – of kindness and friendliness. Hettie ﬁnds the courage to apologise to Billa, an old woman whom she knocked over in the street, and the two of them take a walk with Sam from the cheese shop and his dog, Stanley, and are joyfully complicit in an act of anarchic vandalism. Finally, Sam settles down for a Saturday evening at home with his husband, Harry – both men resting their stockinged feet against Stanley’s ﬂanks – and they rejoice in the fact that ‘from now until tomorrow morning, they could be on their own, undisturbed and unobserved’. Alison Gomm (1974 English) The People’s Queen by Vanora Bennett. Harper, 2011, £7.99 One sometimes wishes one knew what Chaucer was like in much the same way that one speculates about what Shakespeare might have been like to meet. One of the pleasures of Vanora Bennett’s robust, conﬁdent, well-researched historical novel – her fourth – is that one gets to know Chaucer as one might a best friend. He is her unexpected (and perhaps slightly romanticised) hero: a lovable, unglamorous, morally steadfast ﬁgure in a corrupt age. His one fault, by his own admission, is cowardice. He is miserably estranged from Philippa, his beautiful but chilly wife, when he falls in love with the book’s leading lady: the extraordi121

nary Alice Perrers, King Edward III’s mistress. There is no fast historical evidence for their having had an aﬀair, but Bennett makes a good case for it and furnishes herself with a sustaining plot. Alice will eventually inspire Chaucer to ﬁnd his courage. Chaucer will pass on to Alice his gift for seeing what really matters. Alice Perrers’s survival – she was born during the plague – was a ﬂuke. And, as a poor orphan growing up in Essex, her spectacular rise to riches was remarkable. She was a virtuoso opportunist: a social climber, a property speculator, a ferocious pursuer of the good life. Her motto could have been: seize the day and, while you are at it, the silver. She was charming, ruthless but capable of kindness. There is a wonderful description of Alice organising a perfect bath for the ailing king: arranging for the heating of water hours in advance, bringing with her a phial of rosewater and petals which she personally throws in. Bennett sees to it that we feel about her as Chaucer does. We like and disapprove of her simultaneously. She admits, in an afterword, that when she started writing, she was unaware Alice would commandeer the novel to such a degree. Fortune’s wheel is the book’s dominant image. And, as is ﬁtting, it turns unpredictably. Instead of a stately revolution, progress is jerky. Good luck and terrible reversals keep the reader guessing as we roll on through plague, Alice’s liaisons with Chaucer, her hot-and-cold relationship with John of Gaunt, her trial by Peter de la Mare and onwards. It is a capacious tale (at over 500 pages) and bursting with political intrigue. Bennett is especially good at the clear overview – ﬂying like a helicopter over history. And this is a diverting read in an age of austerity because it explores ﬁnancial corruption with such a keen eye. Its cast includes many fourteenth century equivalents to today’s bankers. And the Peasant’s Revolt, with which the book ends, reads like a preﬁguring of the Occupy movement (though more violent and doomed). The amazing thing is that, just when you fear Fortune’s wheel is about to run Alice over, Chaucer rescues her. ‘You have a genius for transformation’, he says. He knows transformation does not have to be ostentatious. He wants her to see that children (she has several) are life’s greatest gift. Meanwhile, he has a good get-away plan up his sleeve: a pilgrimage abroad or, perhaps, to Canterbury. Kate Kellaway (1976 English) 122

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. Orion, 2010, £12.99 (h/b), £7.99 (p/b) Michelle Paver is best known for her Chronicles of Ancient Darkeness series for children but Dark Matter is a ghost story for adults. It is set in 1937 and written in the form of one man’s journal. Jack Miller is 28. He was a grammar school boy who studied physics at UCL and dreamed of being a research scientist, but his family fell on hard times and Jack, reluctantly, had to get a job as a clerk. At the start of the story he has a meeting with four Oxbridge men who are planning an expedition to the Arctic, both to do a meteorological survey and to study biology, geology and ice dynamics. Jack feels as though they are looking down on him and he doesn’t warm to them, but they ask him to join their expedition as the wireless operator. At ﬁrst he is reluctant, but then he realises that this is his one chance to escape his mundane existence. They make their plans, buy their equipment and prepare to head north. They travel to Tromsø, collect their eight huskies, and then depart for their selected Arctic destination of Gruhuken, on Spitsbergen, on a sealing ship. Half way there they hit a problem as the skipper refuses to take them to Grukuken. He won’t explain, he just says that they have made the wrong choice. However they argue him down and, reluctantly, he takes them there. They should have listened to him, as we gradually discover. This book is riveting. The style of the writing is quite abrupt, as one would expect from such a man, but the author’s love of the Arctic shines through Jack’s descriptions. On one of the last days of daylight, Jack writes: If it’s clear, dawn turns the sky an amazing pinkish gold. The snow glitters like diamonds. The whale ribs on the shore are dazzling. The roof of the cabin is blanketed in white, its walls crusted with frost. After a few hours, the light turns, and the bay becomes a sheet of bronze. The day dies in a blaze of astonishing colour: crimson, magenta, violet. So much light.

Jack’s initial dislike of his upper-class team mates is clear, although fairly quickly he begins to hero-worship Gus, the team leader, whom he describes as a ‘Boy’s Own hero’. He also dislikes the dogs at ﬁrst, but of course that doesn’t last – anyone who has read Michelle Paver’s other books would realise that the dogs are bound to be important. Once the men are alone at Gruhuken, the tension of the story slowly begins to build. At ﬁrst Jack spends much of his journal describing their work and their glorious surroundings, but as the days get shorter and then the 123

sun disappears completely, things begin to go wrong. From that point onwards, you are on the edge of your seat, and I, for one, was keeping the light on! Carolyn Carr (Jones 1977 Chemistry) The Book of Wonders by Jasmine Richards. Harper, 2012, £10.85 This is a fast-paced adventure story, an echo of the Arabian Nights. Another Scheherazade is its central character, but this one has none of the discreet wiles of her namesake. Zardi, as she is called, is a feisty 13-year-old; and her companion in her adventures is a mysterious teenage boy, Rhidan, one-time foundling and now her father’s ward. As in the original, her father is the Sultan’s vizier and the Sultan our old friend Shahryar – but with a diﬀerence. He no longer simply decapitates captive females after one night. This may still be the age of the sailing ship and bow and arrow (skills in which Zardi excels) but an Orwellian reign of terror prevails. Curfews are the rule; young girls (one of them Zardi’s sister) are still abducted and after 90 days’ service hunted to death; and magic – thought and practice of – is a capital oﬀence. This is Arribitha, a country where a mighty river, the Tigress, joins two cities, its inland capital and the thriving port of Sabra (anag?) where, luckily, shreds of magic still survive and Zardi seeks the key to her search. Not for nothing is the river given a feminine ending. This is a story of powerful women. Zardi’s strength shows in her appearance, her ‘strong jaw and black eyebrows that swept upwards like two cormorant wings’. She has a wise grandmother, Nonna, who is a dab hand at chorba (for one anxious minute I thought we had wandered into another country); then there is Sula, adoptive mother of Sinbad, half djinni and medicine woman, the beautiful djinni, Khalila, and the evil Queen of the Serpents. These and a colourful cast of sailors, pirates, monsters, dragons, and snakes all lie in Zardi’s path as she pursues her three-fold mission: to rescue her sister, to destroy the Sultan, and to help Rhidan solve the mystery of his origins. By the end of the book the ﬁrst two of these goals have been achieved; the third surely will be the subject of its sequel. Richards writes well, with crisply vivid descriptions of the river, sea and the magic isles that lie beyond. Her strong imagery harks back to the language of the 1001 Nights (compare: ‘Hate blistered Zardi’s in124

sides’ with Sinbad on his third voyage: ‘I felt as if my gall bladder would break against my liver.’). This is the highly charged language of the magic story-teller; and in fact it is in a sense Sinbad’s eighth voyage that we have here, or rather an action replay of the other seven. Sinbad is the sailor-turned-pirate whose boat Zardi and Rhidan hitch a lift on, and they have many of the same adventures as he did. The problem for the reader is that they are spread not over seven voyages but crammed into one. The eﬀect of this is to give a certain cartoon-like speed to much of the action. If, however, it introduces young people to one of the great story collections of the world it is to be welcomed. Elizabeth Nussbaum (Cairns 1951 History) Moon Pie by Simon Mason. David Fickling Books, 2011, £10.99 (h/b), £5.99 (p/b) ‘When I’m older,’ she thought, ‘I’ll remember this midnight picnic as a good thing. I’ll forget that I was scared of the dark and that Dad was strange. I’ll remember the candles in the grass, like ﬂowers made out of ﬂame, and Tug dreaming of pie, and Dad telling me he loves me.’

Moon Pie is the story of 11-year-old Martha. Martha’s mother died in a car accident two years ago, and since then she has had to take charge of the household, as well as help care for her little brother, Tug, who has a hankering for pies. Martha is doing the best she can. She is good at staying calm, but it’s not easy with a father who is losing the plot, and things soon go from bad to worse. Martha makes lists so that she can stay in control: Tidy the house. Make tea. Put Tug to bed. Make Dad like he was before. But soon not even the lists work because something is seriously wrong with her father and he’s not getting better. For one thing, he doesn’t let Martha and Tug see their grandparents anymore. Dad doesn’t get out of bed to go to work, but he does take them on a midnight picnic in the park, which Martha ﬁnds scary. Sometimes her father is very loud and not like proper Dad at all. The characters in Moon Pie are superbly realized and stay with you long after you close the pages of the book. Martha is brave, innocent and wise, all at the same time, and Tug oﬀers needed comic relief, even though this can be heart-wrenching as well as heart-warming. Twelveyear-old Marcus, obsessed with fashion and ﬁlms, is a fabulous creation, and is a great friend to Martha. He brings a lightness to the book. 125

The dialogue is natural, but there is a real lyricism to the prose that touches the heart but never feels forced. Soon the truth behind Martha’s dad’s strangeness is revealed, and the characters must ﬁnd a way to piece their family back together. Alcoholism is a meaty and diﬃcult topic for a children’s book, but an important one. I think the author tackles the subject with skill and sensitivity, and with an ability to ﬁnd hope even in the darkest of places. It could so easily be a depressing book, but this is never the case because of the author’s well-judged tone. Moon Pie is a beautifully written book, and I would highly recommend it. Jasmine Richards (1996 History) Harry Bone-Thief and The Road to Stonehenge by Jan Shirley. Ragged Bears Books, 2011, £7.99 When reading children’s ﬁction, as a teacher of 10- and 11-year-olds, I always have in the back of my mind the question: ‘Would my class like this?’ In the case of Harry Bone-Thief, the answer would be a resounding ‘yes’. Set during the reign of Henry VIII, it tells the story of a young boy called Harry Wright who deﬁes the king. Harry’s voice, written in the ﬁrst person, is lively and engaging and immediately draws the reader into the story. Through listening to the conversations of the adults around him, Harry is able to glean details about the religious changes that are taking place during the Reformation, and the resulting threat to the bones of Saint Thomas Becket, interred in Canterbury cathedral where Harry’s father works as a master carpenter. Together, Harry and his father concoct a plan to save the saint’s bones, which puts them in great danger when the King’s men discover what they have done and Harry’s father is arrested for high treason. The story has a real sense of time and place, along with vivid characterisation. I particularly loved Great Aunt Rose, the grumpy old woman who is only happy when she’s moaning; Lipperty Jack, the little mute vagrant boy who devotes himself to Harry, is also a joy. The whole extended family pull together to petition the king for mercy for Thomas Wright, and along the way the reader is treated to details about how the Tudor court and justice system functioned. The Tudors are often studied at primary school level, so this book would be a good choice for 126

anyone wanting to enrich a child’s knowledge and understanding of this period of history. I was expecting to enjoy The Road to Stonehenge even more, given the intriguing and unusual 5,000-year-old historical setting and an endorsement on the cover from the wonderful Michael Morpurgo. However, I felt more ambivalent about this one – it took me longer to engage with and the pacing seemed a little odd, with present-tense summaries at the end of many of the chapters that abruptly moved the action on: ‘Now Krenn and Jinsy struggle for several days and then at last get up onto what we call the Brendon Hills.’ I also don’t think it is necessary to talk within the text itself about the fact that Salisbury Plain wasn’t called Salisbury Plain 5,000 years ago – this slows down the pace of the narrative, and the two contrasting maps at the beginning and end of the book give all the information needed. However, the book has an interesting plot, centred on a headstrong and independent young girl called Krenn (whose name means ‘doesn’t belong’) who is faced with the ‘impossible task’ of searching for the tribe who abandoned her at birth. It is rich in archaeological and historical details – which I took at face value, as I know very little about this period of history, and which the author states have been carefully researched and checked. I found it fascinating to learn about the social and spiritual lives of people all those millennia ago: details of the rituals they carried out, the food they ate and their matter-of-fact approach to dealing with wolves and bears! It builds to an exciting climax in which the children have to escape the clutches of a tribe intent on sacriﬁcing them to the Lord Sun. All in all, Jan Shirley has written two interesting and enjoyable historical novels for children – I shall certainly be reading Harry Bone-Thief to my class, to see if they enjoy it as much as I did! Rachael Wood (1996 Modern History) Comely Grace by Alexine Crawford. Wrayworks, 2011, £7.99 A madrigal by John Wilbye (1574–1638) is the inspiration for the title of this historical work which has the subtitle ‘A 17th Century Novel of Love and War’. Wilbye, who was born near Diss in Suﬀolk, was himself the son of a tanner, a profession shared by the family at the centre of this 127

book. In the third chapter of the novel the madrigal is sung, though its true signiﬁcance only becomes apparent at the end of the story. It reads as follows: Love me not for comely grace, For my pleasing eye or face Nor for any outward part; No, nor for my constant heart. For those may fail, those may fail, For those may fail or turn to ill So thou and I shall sever. Keep therefore a true woman’s eye, And love me still, but know not why; So hast thou the same reason Still to dote upon me ever.

Careful historical research is a hallmark of the novel, and the framework of the story is provided by actual events in the English Civil War in Farnham and other locations such as Oxford and Bath. The technique of taking characters who are veriﬁable in the historical records, building a plot around them and adding ﬁctional characters is the method chosen by the author. For example, the head of the most prominent family in the book, Jacob Mannory, is based upon a historical Mannory who was a tanner, while his home and workplace, the Tanyard, may still be seen. The hop grower Robert Bicknell did, indeed, live at Timber Hall and, like Michael Gary the wool draper, he is known to have held oﬃce as bailiﬀ. The Vernons of Culver House provide an interesting contrast in terms of class and education, and Harry Vernon’s return from study at Oxford creates a useful link with the Royalist cause. The novel is the story of three Farnham families in the early 1640s, and explores the eﬀects of war on their existing rivalries and power struggles. It emphasises the contrast between the grim reality of war and the initial aspirations of the men who join Sir William Waller’s Parliamentary army. It also requires the reader to imagine the pressures on women waiting for news at home when Farnham Castle is garrisoned. The religious conﬂicts of the day ﬁnd a place as the lecturer Duncomb clashes with the curate Hermann Shepheard, a supporter of Archbishop Laud. At the heart of the novel is Abigail Mannory, a young woman whose life provides the thread which unites the action of the novel. A sympathetic character throughout, Abigail is kind-hearted in her dealings with the young boy, Hal, capable as a teacher, loyal to her friends, dutiful 128

to her own family, and faithful to her lover Ralph Attﬁeld, despite his injuries and disﬁgurement in war. As for Hal, who is orphaned at the start of the book, we trace his education, his involvement in the war and his progress to security and a proﬁtable trade. The ending comes as no real surprise, but the author brings the themes of love and war vividly to life. Judith Garner (1977 Lit Hum) Books Received Ephemeral Media. Edited by Paul Grainge. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, £60 (h/b), £16.99 (p/b) Ephemeral Media provides case studies in television and web entertainment and looks at the production of transient forms of media. An interview Charlie Mawer (1987 English) gave to Paul Grainge on TV Promotion and Broadcast Design forms a chapter entitled ‘Transitory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube’.

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College Gazette Higher Degrees, Diplomas and Certiﬁcates: Examination Results – Trinity Term 2011 BCL Batrouney, Edward Burningham, Sarah Campbell, Scott Gascoigne, Catherine Line, Lucy Moore, Alastair Schmidt, Katharina

Shim, Amy Simpson, James Sun, Michael Magister Juris Nunes Mauricio, Isabela

DPhil Andrews, Christine (Music) Bowman, David (Educational Studies) Cazemier, Annelies (Ancient History) Chuang, Chia-Chen (Pharmacology) Fortin, Antonio (General Linguistics & Comparative Philology) Hanlon, Helen (Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics) Iglesias Cajaraville Rogers, Graciela (History) Iversen, Sarah (Humanities) Kangur, Alvar (Economics) Money-Kyrle, Rebecca (Socio-legal Studies) Okamura, Ken (Management Studies) Papthanasiou, Ioannis (Law) Purdekova, Andrea (Development Studies) Rifai, Bassel (Engineering Science) Ripps, Michael (History) Sandom, Christopher (Zoology) Sheehy, Suzie (Particle Physics) Zommers, Zinta (Zoology) MBA Ansari, Oosman Qureshi, Muhammad Faisal

MPhil Ahmed, Arzoo (Medieval Arabic Thought) Andrasova, Veronika (Politics: European Politics & Society) Faber van der Meulen, Evert (Islamic Studies & History) Hilder, Jennifer (Greek and/or Roman History) Keelmann, Vello (Russian & East European Studies) Kruttli, Mathias (Economics) Olsson, Joshua (Islamic Studies & History) Pinnerup, Io (English Studies: Medieval) Popp, Emily (Economics) Ruhenstroth-Bauer, Maximilian (Politics:European Politics & Society) Sheridan Breakwell, Suan (Modern British & European History) Syed, Hasnain (Islamic Studies & History) MSc African Studies Bodeux, Leila Gillis, Sarah Noyes, Alexander Applied Linguistics & Second Language Acquisition Holmbrook, Amanda

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Kei, Wing Kulak, Alicja Zhou, Qian Applied Statistics Ren, Yafei Wang, Li Wang, Yidi Zhao, Yuxin Archaeological Science Vaiglova, Petra Biochemistry Ayse Ozhan Biomedical Engineering Leung, Liza Chui Shan Ng, Jia Tsing Criminology & Criminal Justice Gardiner, Hannah Louise Saumweber, Helena Skelly, Sinead Economics for Development De, Sourovi Lowe, Matthew Education: Child Development & Education Batsukh, Javzan Education: E-learning Khidirova, Evgeniya Milburn-Curtis, Coral Parr, Simon Radia, Bhaveet Education (Higher Education) Zhang, Yixiao Evidence Based Social Intervention Braidwood, Ruth Law & Finance Clennett, Katharine Learning & Teaching Blewitt, Sophie White, Katharine Woﬃndin, Laura Mathematical & Computational Finance Sharma, Ishitaa Wong, Man Kuan Yee, Zhao Wei Modern Chinese Studies Do, Hyun-Sung Hermann, Hans Martin

Lin, Bo Poh, Ming Yan Angela Pharmacology Sati, Ankita Zeng, Yue Sociology Wang, Wei Zoology Ruth Brandt MSt Classical Archaeology Dalglish, Dominic Thorpe, Emily May English (650-1550) Brooks, Britton English (1660-1830) Furlong, Stephen Kassman, Oliver Film Aesthetics Zigmond, Joseph History of Art & Visual Culture Akel, Joseph Budge, Andrew Clark, Camilla Landolt, Garrett Millington, Ruth Sayer, Miranda Modern British & European History Bowden, Kate Colville, William St John-Smith, Christopher Modern Languages Mays, Hannah Slavonic Studies Rowley, Thomas PGCE (Masters) Appleton, Lucy Baker, Samantha Bradbury, Huw Burland, Jon Davies, John Downs, Fabian Handy, Charlotte Malik, Nicola Mather, Jeremy

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PGCE (Masters) continued Patchett, Fay Pugsley, Richard Rumsey, James

Symonds, Isobel White, Emellia Wilson, Sian Wylie, Kate

Second Public Examination Results – Trinity Term 2011 Engineering Science Ashcroft, Ian Betney, Matthew Cohen, Oliver McNaught, Kirsty

Ancient & Modern History Pearson, Jonathan Biochemistry Kwok, Ho Man Lee, Eliza Ling, Stephanie

English & Modern Languages Cooke, Laetitia

Biological Sciences Belben, Helen Bishop, Thomas Collison, Elizabeth Grenville, Anna Jordan, Harriet Luxton, Katie Murray, Hazel Stoye, Sophie Webb, George

English Language & Literature Botwright, Kimberley Dalton, Benjamin Forbes, Zoey Kelway-Bamber, Alice Knight, Lucinda Monaghan, Matthew Ross-Southall, Mika Sawyer, Georgia Westwood, Benjamin Wood, Alex

Chemistry Basheer, Tahseen Egan, Nichola Lewis, Simon Smart, Jessica Wilcox, David Wood, Christopher

European & Middle Eastern Languages (Spanish & Hebrew) Baron, Amy Experimental Psychology Andrews, Samantha Gohil, Ophrah Roberts, Emily Thompson, Jodie

Classical Archaeology & Ancient History Williams, John Economics & Management Bloodworth, Amber Charlton-Scott, Jeremy Shah, Kavan Wilke, Selina

Fine Art Aleksandrova, Anna Horton-Stephens, Louis-Jack

Engineering, Economics & Management Fan, Keng Hang

History Hooper, Daisy Knox, Clement Parikka, Sanna Poulden, Gervase

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Precious, Emily Regan, Amelia Riddle, Douglas History & Politics Lee, Karen Wei Sian McKenzie, Thomas Owens, Joshua Peters, Robert Wheeler, Samuel Wong, Bi Min Jurisprudence: Course I Bernard-Stevenson, Jamila Lee, Constance McDonald, Laura Rickwood, Elizabeth Sivabalah, Kalpana Jurisprudence: Course II Batty, Anke Literae Humaniores Ashe, Suzanna Baddeley, Samuel Monaghan, Christopher Stott, Emily Streeten, Charles Mathematics Amir, Ali Stevenson, Ross Truran, Gemma Mathematics (3 year) Sheehan, Lucy Mathematics & Philosophy (BA) Black, Philippa Kemp, Thomas Mathematics & Statistics Xu, Weiwei Chong, Eilyn Yee Lin Medical Sciences Blackburn, Verity

Dawson, Sarah Jones, Hayley Kang, James Kumari, Nina McKillen, Benjamin Shah, Vishal Modern Languages Besant, Thomas Braddock, Laurel Dickinson, Emma Lunn, John Reeves, Elizabeth Stevens, Anna Modern Languages & Linguistics Watts-Huston, Richard Music Black, James Maslin, Alice Peskett, Ruth Philosophy & Theology Reilly, Joanne Wilton, Andrew Physics Havranek, Olivia Herpoldt, Karla-Luise Page, Adam Skinner, Malcolm Physics (3 year) Chan, Yik Ham Jennifer Physiological Sciences Friday, Bridget Raynor, Miriam PPE Best, Chiara Burt, Samuel Davies, Caroline Gould, Grace Leary, Daniel O’Brien, Eve

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Theology Clarke, Karen Harding, Thomas Jones, Louisa Woodberry, Imogen

Pares, David Wingﬁeld, Alice Kremel, Darja

Matriculated 2011 Undergraduate courses Name

School

Subject

Abdul-Moomin, Issah Aldred, Sarah Allen, Richard Allnutt, Roseanna Arstall, Adam Baker, Jodie Baloch, Yumna Barnsley, Kristian Barron, Katie Bennett, Paul Birse, Katherine Bland, Eleanor Boughtﬂower, Joanna Brown, Laura Bullock, Caspar Cane, Andrew Chan, Zoe Chaplin, Sarah Chapman, Jonathan Chen, Sheng

Brighton College Pate’s Grammar School, Cheltenham Wirral Grammar School for Girls Queen’s Gate School, London Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, Amersham Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge The British School, Warsaw, Poland Farlingaye High School, Woodbridge Weald of Kent Grammar School, Tonbridge Royal Grammar School, Guildford Newstead Wood School, Bromley Stephen Perse Foundation, Cambridge Presdales School, Ware Eccelesbourne School, Duﬃeld, Belper Hampton School Andover College, Andover Concord College, Shrewsbury Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls, Borehamwood Royal Grammar School, Guildford Cambridge International Centre of Shanghai Normal University, Cambridge Haberdashers Aske’s Boys’ School, Elstree Audenshaw School, Manchester Exeter School Alcester Grammar School Leighton Park School, Reading Townsend Church of England School, St Albans Notre Dame School, Cobham

PPE Jurisprudence Engineering Science (MEng) Ancient & Modern History Mathematics (3yr) English Jurisprudence Physics (4yr) (MPhys) History PPE Medicine (pre-clinical) History Biochemistry (MBiochem) Medicine (pre-clinical) Modern Languages (4yr) Physics (4yr) (MPhys) Chemistry (MChem) PPE Literae Humaniores

Engineering Science (MEng) Engineering Science (MEng) Chemistry (MChem) English Chemistry (MChem) Economics & Management Biomedical Sciences History & Modern Languages (4yr) Edwards, Sara Queen’s Gate School, London Classics & English (4yr) Ellar, Jason Strode’s College, Egham History & Politics Elphinstone, Charis Richard Huish College, Taunton English Enyutina, Marina St Paul’s Girls’ School, London Modern Languages (4yr) Fairbank, Rebecca Beths Grammar School, Bexley History Fletcher, Henry Eton College, Windsor Engineering Science (MEng) Galeano Carraro, Mara European School of Culham, Abingdon Biological Sciences Galt, Fiona University College for the Creative Arts, Canterbury Fine Art Ghaui, Harriet Kingswood School, Bath English Goddard-Rebstein, Rachael York House School, Vancouver English Godfrey-Faussett, George Westminster School, London Biological Sciences Gosai, Avni The Heathland School, Hounslow Chemistry (MChem) Graham, Alexander Rainhill High School, Prescot Jurisprudence Cobb, Adam Connolly, Michael Davidson, Jonathan De Rosa, Daniel deSousa, Aparna Dodhia, Rakesh Easton, Harriet

134

Grant, Robert Grundy, Katherine

Eton College, Windsor Farnborough Sixth Form College

Classical Arch. & Anc. History Modern Languages & Linguistics (4yr) Halls, Eleanor Wimbledon High School Modern Languages (4yr) Hames, Phoebe Christ’s Hospital, Horsham Literae Humaniores Hamlyn, Lili South Hampstead High School, London English Hanwell, Alexander Tonbridge School English Hardern, Kieran Carre’s Grammar School, Sleaford Medicine (pre-clinical) Harding, Rachel Bungay High School Science College Biochemistry (MBiochem) Hellier, Georgina Guildford High School English Henley, Joanna Downe House School, Thatcham English Hernandez, Adrian Glyn Technology School, Ewell Biochemistry (MBiochem) Hill, Alison Tiﬃn Girls’ School, Kingston Upon Thames Literae Humaniores Hopkin, Peter Eltham College, Mottingham, London English Hoskins, Thomas Oundle School Literae Humaniores Hyde, Christopher Abingdon School Literae Humaniores Imrie, Fergus Charterhouse, Godalming Mathematics (3yr) Ingham, Joseph Rossall School, Fleetwood History Jeﬀeries, Alexandra Truro High School for Girls Jurisprudence with LSE Jesrani, Ria Loughborough High School Economics & Management Jiang, Zhen Cambridge Tutors College, Croydon Mathematics & Statistics (BA) Jones, Rose Wirral Grammar School for Girls Modern Languages (4yr) Kelly, Mark Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakeﬁeld Physics (4yr) (MPhys) King, Thomas Dulwich College, London Chemistry (MChem) Lang, Alice Virginia University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia PPE Lawlor, Hannie Blessed George Napier School, Banbury Modern Languages (4yr) Leaman, Rosalyn Yateley Sixth Form College Mathematics (3yr) Lee, Harrison Torquay Boys Grammar School Chemistry (MChem) Leung, Howard St Joseph’s College, Hong Kong Engineering, Economics & Management Lines, Harry Westminster School, London Philosophy & Theology Loftus, Liam Blue Coat School, Liverpool Medicine (pre-clinical) Louloudis, Theodora St Mary’s School, Ascot Modern Languages (4yr) Luciano, Cara King’s High School, Warwick PPE Luscombe, Georgia King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham History & Politics Machover, Eli Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, London Philosophy & Theology MacMahon, Catriona James Gillespie High School, Edinburgh PPE Masoero, Martha Liceo Classico Statale V. Gioberti, Torino History & Politics McClean, Paul Tiﬃn School, Kingston Upon Thames Modern Languages (4yr) Merson, Georgia Magdalen College School, Oxford PPE Mooney, Elizabeth Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School Biomedical Sciences Ngum, Ismaila Uxbridge College Jurisprudence Nicholls, Daniel Caterham School Literae Humaniores Noble, Lucy Townsend Church of England School, St Albans Biological Sciences Ormond, Dominique Harrogate Grammar School History Oswal, Abhishek The Grammar School at Leeds Medicine (pre-clinical) Parker, Alice James Allen’s Girls’ School, Dulwich, London Modern Languages (4yr) Pashley, Rose Nelson and Colne College Mathematics (3yr) Passby, Lauren Rushden Community College Medicine (pre-clinical) Patel, Matishalin Peter Symonds College, Winchester Biological Sciences Paterson, Evelyn Cheltenham Ladies’ College History Perez Rodriguez, Margarita Wycombe Abbey School, High Wycombe Mathematics (3yr) Peters, Lauren Sixth Form College, Solihull Physics (4yr) (MPhys) Petrie, Rebecca Kennet School, Thatcham History Phillpot, James Eton College, Windsor Theology Philpott, James Norton Knatchbull School, Ashford Modern Languages (4yr) Reeves, Jessica Putney High School, London Music Rissanen, Aarne Jyvaskylan Lyseon Iukio, Aalto Economics & Management

135

Roberts, Thomas Haberdashers’ Askes’s Boys’ School, Elstree Robertson, Mairi SCEGGS Darlinghurst, New South Wales Robinson, Sinikka St George’s British International School, Rome Rosser, Samantha Maynard School, Exeter Shaikh, Faisal Bridgewater County High School, Warrington Singer, Raﬀael Sir-Kar-Popper Schule, Vienna Sivaskantharajah, Suganya Tiﬃn Girls’ School, Kingston Upon Thames Soper, James Marlborough College Stephenson, India Allerton Grange High School, Leeds Stunt, James Royal Grammar School, Guildford Tan, Gen Huong Anglo Chinese School, Singapore Tatham, Chloe St Mary’s School, Calne Taylor, Peter The Athenian School, Danville, CA Thomas, Rebecca Claire St Brandan’s Sixth Form College, Bristol Tortoishell, Amy Uppingham School Turner, Christopher King Edward VI College, Stourbridge Tyson-Green, Amy King George V College, Southport Wang, Yutian Hurtwood House School, Dorking Watt, Daisy Oundle School West, Isabella Central Newcastle High School Wiseman, Sam University College School, Hampstead Young, Fiona Fort Pitt Grammar School, Chatham Zacharia, Sophie St Paul’s Girls’ School, London Zetter, Richard St Albans School Zheng, Huimin Cambridge International Centre of Shanghai Normal University, Cambridge Ziya, Kimberley Dame Alice Harpur School, Bedford

History PPE Biological Sciences Biological Sciences Engineering Science (MEng) Mathematics & Philosophy Mathematics (3yr) Music Biological Sciences Classical Arch. & Anc. History Jurisprudence Philosophy & Theology Mathematics (3yr) English History & Politics Physics (4yr) (MPhys) Classical Arch. & Anc. History Mathematics & Statistics (BA) Modern Languages (4yr) Economics & Management Chemistry (MChem) Experimental Psychology Experimental Psychology Theology Physics (3yr) Jurisprudence

Visiting Students Name Allison, Deborah Austin, James Banerjee, Mohini Chen, Yimiao Cogan, Noah Copfer, Daniel Dick, Laura Fertal, Osasha Floyd, Riley Garrigues, Miles Grabowski, Eric Green, Hannah Greene, Michael Haasl, Emmamarie Harnal, Aditya Harris, Christopher Henares, Francis Juergens, Hanna Kafaﬁan, David Kloeber, Meghan Kutler, Lauren Loya, Bradon MacGregor, Marilla MacLean, Hannah Mitchell, Madeline Pan, Junhua Park, Catherine

Home Institution Northeastern University, Boston, MA Kenyon College, Gambier, OH Smith College, Northampton, MA Babson College, Babson Park, MA Vassar, Poughkeepsie, NY College of Wooster, Wooster, OH University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN Brown University, Providence, RI Quinnipiac University, Hamden, CT Smith College, Northampton, MA Vassar, Poughkeepsie, NY Carleton College, Northﬁeld, MN Connecticut College, New London, CT University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL Lafayette College, Easton, PA University of Redlands, Redlands, CA Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, MN Cornell University, Ithaca, NY University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN Amherst College, Amherst, MA Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA

136

Subject Politics Economics Philosophy Economics Classics Philosophy Economics Philosophy English Philosophy Economics Politics Classics History Economics Politics Economics History Economics Business Maths Physics English, Theology Classics Economics Classics English

Schommer, Abby Simmonds, Alexander Tu, Jenny Tyler, Joshua Walter, Benjamin Wang, Jing Jing Weinger, Paul Wooley, Tory Zhang, Yuanyang

Stonehill College, Easton, MA Columbia University, Columbia, NY Bates College, Lewiston, ME Towson University, Towson, MA Haverford College, Haverford, PA Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Vassar, Poughkeepsie, NY Vassar, Poughkeepsie, NY University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

Organisational Business History Economics Physics Classics Economics Philosophy Ethics & Archaeology Economics

Graduates Accepted for Courses 2011 Name Adagbada, Akeem Amasyali, David An, Jiangshan

Previous Education School of Oriental and African Studies Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada Hong Kong Institute of Education

Subject Bachelor of Civil Law MSc in Sociology MSc Applied Linguistics & 2nd Language Acquisition Anstee, Peter Australian National University, Canberra Bachelor of Civil Law Barrett, Fionnuala Trinity College, Dublin MSt English (1800–1914) Benaim, Saguy Sagie Imperial College, London Mathematics & the Foundations of Computer Science Bench, Diana University of Birmingham PGCE Bennett-Curry, Aoife National University of Ireland, Maynooth MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation & Management Berghoﬀ, Andre Westdeutsch Akademie für Kommunikation MBA e.V., Cologne, Germany Black, James Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford MSt Music (Composition) Bongianino, Umberto Università di Lingue e Comunicazione, MPhil Islamic Art & Archaeology Milan, Italy Brighton, Caroline Leeds University DPhil in Zoology Cao, Yecheng University College, London MSt Archaeology Carlson, Mallory Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY MSc Refugee & Forced Migration Carter, Alexandra Loughborough University PGCE Carthy, Robert University of Surrey, Guildford Mathematics & the Foundations of Computer Science Cetkovski, James Amherst College, Amherst, MA MSt English (1900–present) Chadha, Jyot Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA MBA Chandrasekaran, Sruthi Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India MSc Comparative Social Policy Chiu, Jasmine Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford DPhil History Chiu, Ka Min Peter City University of Hong Kong Bachelor of Civil Law Crake, Calum Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford DPhil CDT Healthcare Innovation Davies, Jonathan Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford MPhil Greek and/or Roman History De Santa, Timothy Amherst College, Amherst, MA MSt in Medieval & Modern Languages Diener, Ann-Soﬁe Lincoln College, Oxford DPhil Archaeology Downes, Emily Girton College, Cambridge MSt Jewish Studies in the Greek/ Roman Period Drobnitzky, Neele Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany MSc Radiation Biology Elliot, Michael Dalhousie University Schulich School of Law, Bachelor of Civil Law Halifax, Nova Scotia Farmer, Charlotte University of St Andrews PGCE Frost, Leanne Loughborough University PGCE Graham, Florence Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA MPhil in Slavonic Studies Gregory, Matthew Imperial College, London DPhil in Zoology Grotecloss, Kristin Yale University, New Haven, CT MSt Archaeology Gundersen, Anders Sunnas University of Bergen, Norway MBA

137

Han, Jun

Peking University, Beijing, People’s Republic DPhil in Sociology of China Hartley, Julia Christ Church, Oxford DPhil in Medieval & Modern Languages Hogg, Claire Keble College, Oxford BPhil in Philosophy Howard, Laura University of Birmingham PGCE Hunter, William University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, DPhil Engineering Science Wels, Austria Ibanez Leon, Arturo Hernan Universidad de Chile, Santiago Magister Juris Jia, Junfei National University of Singapore MSc Mathematical & Computational Finance Johl, Jasdeep University of California, Berkeley, CA MSc Comparative Social Policy Khan, Mehreen Trinity College, Oxford MPhil in Politics: European Politics & Society Killian, Ann Yale University, New Haven, CT MPhil English Studies (Medieval) King, Verity Exeter University PGCE Koelle, Michael University of Tübingen, Germany MPhil Economics Kolasinski, James Christ Church College, Oxford DPhil Clinical Neuroscience Kotselaynen, Elena Saint Petersburg State University, Russia MSt Film Aesthetics Krishniah, Subiksha University of Wales, Bangor MSc Education (Comparative & International Ed) Kullenberg, Janosch Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany MSc Refugee & Forced Migration Lee, Joanna Edinburgh University DPhil Biochemistry Levshin, Anatoly Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada MPhil International Relations Logtenberg, Anne Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg, Netherlands MSc Criminology & Criminal Justice (Res.Methods) Longford, Emily St Hilda’s College, Oxford PGCE Maheswaran, Pratheesh Queen Mary, University of London MSc in Pharmacology Malischewski, Charlotte-Anne Earlham College, Richmond, IN MSc Refugee & Forced Migration Man, Ho Yin City University of Hong Kong Bachelor of Civil Law Manrique Zuniga, Santiago Ruhr University Bochum, Germany DPhil Structural Biology Mao, Yuanbo Chinese University of Hong Kong DPhil English Language & Literature McManus, Colin University of Toronto, Canada DPhil Engineering Science McStay, Leah University of Queensland, Australia Bachelor of Civil Law Miller, Eva University of Edinburgh MPhil Cuneiform Studies Miller, Jayson University of North London MSc Applied Linguistics & 2nd Language Acquisition Morris, Gerard University of Bristol DPhil Biochemistry Mountain, James Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford DPhil Systems Approaches in Bio-Medical Science Ng, Esther University College, London DPhil Genomic Medicine & Statistics Ng, Jia Tsing Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford DPhil Systems Approaches in Bio-Medical Science Nicolau, Andrew London School of Economics MSc Applied Statistics Noordally, Karim St Hilda’s College, Oxford Medicine (Clinical) Norris, Hayley University of Nottingham PGCE Nowak, Radoslaw Mansﬁeld College, Oxford DPhil Systems Approaches in Bio-Medical Science Parikka, Sanna Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford MSt Modern British & European History Petek, Nik University of Bristol MSt Archaeology Philips, Lucinda University of Exeter PGCE Poon, Martin Exeter College, Oxford PGCE Powell, Oliver University of Birmingham Bachelor of Civil Law Pydah, Akhila Women’s Christian College, Chennai, India MSc Education (Child Development & Education)

138

Rogers, Sophie

University of Manchester

MSc Applied Linguistics & 2nd Language Acquisition Rulf, Martin University of Lancaster MBA Rustad, Britta University of Idaho, Moscow, ID MSt African Studies Sabone, Ludo University of Cape Town, South Africa MSc African Studies Salzmann, Franz University of St Gallen, Switzerland MSc in Russian & East European Studies Shepherd, Hannah Exeter University PGCE Spoida, Peter Technical University Munich, Germany DPhil Mathematics St John-Smith, Christopher Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford DPhil History Stone, Andrew Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT MSt English (1550–1700) Supavatanakul, Pitchapa Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan MSt History of Art & Visual Culture Terzieva, Irina Soﬁa University, Bulgaria Magister Juris Thompson, Jordan University of Waterloo, Canada DPhil Condensed Matter Physics Thornton, Alice Corpus Christi College, Oxford MPhil in Russian & East European Studies Townley, Elizabeth Bristol University MSt Archaeology Trumble, Angela Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa MSt History of Art & Visual Culture Upﬁll-Brown, Alexander Stanford University, Stanford, CA MSc in Sociology Viaud, Gautier Ecole Centrale Paris, France MSc Mathematical Modelling & Scientiﬁc Computing Vijayakumaraguru, Maathumei London School of Economics MSc Mathematical & Computational Finance Waller, Alessia Emory University, Atlanta, GA MSc Applied Linguistics & 2nd Language Acquisition Westwood, Nicola St Catherine’s College, Oxford PGCE White, Hannah Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford MSt in Study of Religion Wild, Katie University of Reading PGCE Wyeth, William Queen’s University, Belfast MSt Late Antique & Byzantine Studies Wynne, Hilary Exeter College, Oxford DPhil General Linguistics & Comparative Philology Yang, Yang Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic MFE (Master in Financial of China Economics) Yasuda, Arei Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan MBA Yasus, Maxim Irkutsk State University, Russia MSc Law & Finance Ye, Rebecca Nanyang Technological University, Singapore MSc in Sociology Zheng, Ran University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI MFE (Master in Financial Economics)

139

Editor’s Notes The following is a reminder about Brown Book contributions. News items News forms can be downloaded from the alumni webpage. They should be sent by post or e-mail to the Development Oﬃce and will be passed on to the Editor. News need not be conﬁned to what has happened over the past year; if you have not sent anything in for some time, the Editor welcomes a report of what you have been doing since you were last in contact, but requests that it is succinct. The Editor normally exercises only a light editorial hand on News items, but it may be necessary to shorten, for example, lengthy entries and details of children’s careers. Articles Planning for articles starts almost before the previous Brown Book is sent out. Ideas may emerge from a number of sources: the LMHA Committee (which has formal responsibility for the editorial function), the College, the Gaudy talks, or discussions with Senior Members. Suggestions for the sort of items you would like, or would like more of, should be sent to the Editor or the Articles Editor. Reviews of publications Potential publications for review are usually identiﬁed by books being sent to the Reviews Editor, or from the News forms or press notices; the publisher/author will be asked to provide a review copy. The Reviews Editor has discretion over the selection of a reviewer, and advises the potential reviewer on the format for the copy, word length and deadline. Word length is determined by the nature of the publication, the appropriate balance within the review section and the amount of space available. Some publications submitted for review may be given short notices or listed as ‘Publications Received’. Publications for review in The Brown Book should be with the Reviews Editor by the end of the previous October at the latest.

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Obituaries Obituaries are normally written by another Senior Member, or in some cases by family members. Obituary requests are sometimes made by another Senior Member or by the family, in these cases the Obituaries Editor would appreciate suggestions for a writer. The Obituaries Editor advises on format and length. As an alternative to a full obituary, we may include a short obituary notice, using material from the Register or available from College records with, where possible, some comments of a more personal nature. Editor

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Notices from LMH Conferment of Degrees The Development Oﬃce handles the administration of all degrees. Please contact Maya Evans in the Development Oﬃce, telephone 01865 274362 or e-mail [email protected]. Full details, including dates of degree congregations, are on the alumni section of the website: www.lmh.ox.ac.uk. Alumni holding BA degrees become eligible to take their MA in Trinity Term 21 terms from their term of matriculation. A fee (currently £15) is payable. The University limits the numbers of graduands whom Colleges may present at any one Sheldonian degree congregation. As a result we have instituted a ceremony at LMH at which the Dean of Degrees presents MA certiﬁcates for degrees previously conferred in absentia. The ceremony is followed by a reception in College and is an excellent opportunity to reunite with contemporaries back at LMH. The next ceremony/ reception is held on the afternoon of Saturday 9 February 2013 and will be for those who matriculated in 2005. You need to register for the degree by 1 February. Contact the Development Oﬃce for details. Those who do not wish to take their MA are still very welcome as spectators at the ceremony, and at the reception afterwards. Three new ceremonies have been created in the Degree Congregation calendar partly to provide places to graduate alumni in person for the MA. These are on 26 October 2012, 9 March 2013 and 22 June 2013. Please contact Maya Evans if you would be interested in any of these. Degree Transcripts If you matriculated before Michaelmas Term 2007, you can order an oﬃcial academic transcript from the Senior Tutor’s Oﬃce. Please email [email protected] allowing three weeks for processing. If you matriculated in, or after, 2007 please use your Student Self Service account. For Degree Conﬁrmation Letters, please e-mail the Degree Conferrals Oﬃce in the Examination Schools: [email protected]. Copies of Degree Certiﬁcates are no longer issued by the Degree Conferrals Oﬃce, only replacement certiﬁcates. 142

2012 Gaudy and LMHA Annual General Meeting There will be a Gaudy and Garden Party over the weekend of 23–24 June 2012. On the Saturday there will be the Gaudy Dinner for those who matriculated between 1962 and 1969, including the 50th anniversary of the 1962 year. On the Sunday there will be a programme open to all alumni, with lectures, seminars and exhibitions, as well as an excellent buﬀet lunch. Members of the 1972 matriculation year are warmly invited to celebrate their 40th anniversary over lunch in the Pipe Partridge Building. The LMHA Annual General Meeting will be held in the afternoon of 24 June immediately before the Garden Party. Details of the weekend’s events have already been sent to those eligible for the Gaudy Dinner. These are also enclosed with this Brown Book. You may also book on the website, www.lmh.ox.ac.uk.

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Dining in College The Senior Common Room of Lady Margaret Hall is pleased to invite alumni to dine at High Table at a Guest Night once in each term at their own expense. Alumni may also bring a guest. These arrangements will be reviewed after a trial period and if successful will be made permanent. Each Tuesday in term is alternately a Guest Night (3 courses) or a Special Guest Night (4 courses plus dessert), as is each Friday. A list of Guest Nights and Special Guest Nights will be available on the LMH website at www.lmh.ox.ac.uk, or you can telephone the Development Oﬃce (01865 274362) to conﬁrm dates. If you would like to dine, please ﬁll in the form below. Name (inc. preferred title) ............................................................................................ Matric. Year ............... Surname at LMH (if diﬀerent from above) .............................. Address ........................................................................................................................ ..................................................................................................................................... Email ......................................................... Telephone ............................................... Date you wish to dine ................ Dietary requirements .............................................. Guest’s name (including title) ...................................................................................... Guest’s dietary requirements ....................................................................................... Dinners will be charged at cost. You will be invoiced for the exact amount after the event. Please return this form to the Development Oﬃce, LMH, Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6QA not less than one week before your proposed visit. The Development Director will act as your SCR host or arrange an appropriate alternative host. If the dinner is already full, we will let you know. Senior Members may also book SCR guest rooms, subject to availability. To conﬁrm availability and to book a guest room please telephone the Conference Oﬃce on 01865 274320 or email [email protected].

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