William Watson 1917–2007

William Watson (1917–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a scholar whose contribution to the field of Asian art and archaeology was both multifaceted and far-reaching. He earned a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge to read Modern and Medieval Languages (1936–1939), and it was at Cambridge that he met a fellow-student Katherine Armfield, whom he married in 1940. After World War II, Watson took up his first post in the arts in 1947, joining the staff of the British and Medieval Department of the British Museum. In 1966, he left the British Museum and moved to the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art to become its Director and take up the professorship of Chinese Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Watson travelled widely and often, and he became fascinated with the arts and language of Japan.

Anthony David Nuttall 1937–2007

Anthony David Nuttall (1937–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was born on April 25, 1937, and grew up in Hereford. He attended Hereford Grammar School and then Watford Grammar School, where he received a thorough, old-fashioned classical education. Nuttall then went to Merton College in the University of Oxford, where he met his lifelong friend Stephen Medcalf. In 1962, he was appointed lecturer in English at the new University of Sussex, rising to professor ten years later, and in 1978 he became Pro-Vice-Chancellor. After twenty-two years teaching at Sussex, Nuttall applied for a fellowship at New College, Oxford. Common Sky (1974) was the book in which he emerged as a critic with a distinctive and compelling way of looking at literature. Another book, Overheard by God (1980) is about George Herbert's poetry, but its first, riveting sentence displays the brilliance of its immodesty. In New Mimesis (1983), Nuttall discusses the present state of literary theory. He also wrote Essay on Man (1984), The Alternative Trinity (1998), and The Stoic in Love (1989).

Charles Francis Digby Moule 1908–2007

Charles Francis Digby Moule (1908–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was probably the most influential British New Testament scholar of his time. The youngest of their three children, he was born in the same house as his father, and spent a happy if often solitary childhood in China. Moule spent three years studying theology and training for Holy Orders in the Church of England at Ridley Hall. He soon had to take on leadership of New Testament teaching at the University of Cambridge for the Regius Professor, A. M. Ramsey. Moule was also fascinated, without losing his head as a critic, by the associated question of interaction between liturgy and literature in the early church, posed by such cultic interpreters of the gospels as G. Bertram. He joined the Evangelical Fellowship for Theological Literature, founded in 1942, an impressive body of younger authors that came to include Henry Chadwick, G. W. H. Lampe, S. L. Greenslade, and F. W. Dillistone; the moving spirit was Max Warren.

Michael Vincent Levey 1927–2008

Michael Vincent Levey (1927–2008), a Fellow of the British Academy, devoted his professional career to the National Gallery, becoming one of its most distinguished and effective directors. During his time in office (1973–1987), he was substantially responsible for modernising the Gallery in both its attitudes and services to the public. New programmes were introduced and new galleries were built, and, most important of all, a number of masterpieces were added to the collection. At a New Year's Eve party in 1953, Levey met Brigid Brophy, an up-and-coming novelist, the daughter of the writer John Brophy. Love was instantaneous and in six months they were married. His most wide-ranging innovation in the administration of the National Gallery was the creation of a fully professional Education Department. At his death, Levey was engaged in writing a biography of Ellen Terry, which met both his great interest in the history of the theatre and his fascination with a magnetic personality who had long intrigued him.

Bryan Ronald Wilson 1926–2004

Bryan Ronald Wilson (1926–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a world-renowned sociologist of religion. He was awarded a D.Litt. by the University of Oxford in 1994, the same year that he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Wilson was also awarded an Arnold Gerstenberg studentship, which allowed him to take up a place at the London School of Economics, where Maurice Ginsberg introduced him to the literature of the sociology of religion and where he developed a life-long interest in sectarian movements. He returned to Yorkshire to take up an Assistant Lectureship in Sociology in the Department of Social Studies at the University of Leeds in October 1955, being promoted to Lecturer in 1957. There Wilson taught courses on urban sociology, sociological theory, and the social institutions of modern Britain, as well as on the sociology of religion. He was a Fellow of All Souls College for thirty years. The themes of secularisation, rationalism, and sectarianism were of particular interest to Wilson throughout his academic life.

Alan William Raitt 1930–2006

Alan William Raitt (1930–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, went up to Magdalen College at the University of Oxford from King Edward's Grammar School in Morpeth, in 1948. He progressed from being an undergraduate there to graduate student, Fellow by Examination, Fellow, Tutor, and Senior Tutor, as well as serving the college as a distinguished Vice-President from 1983 to 1985. Raitt had by then already been named in 1976 Special Lecturer in French Literature for the university and, three years later, University Reader. In 1992 he received the accolade of an ad hominem Chair. Raitt had a gift for friendship; one of his greatest friends was Pierre Castex. His reputation as an international authority on nineteenth-century French literature is second to none. Unlike some British and American scholars, Raitt is widely read and admired by the French themselves, and his name figures prominently in all bibliographies devoted to Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Gustave Flaubert. Despite his many commitments, both in Oxford and in the sphere of French studies generally, he remained a consistently prolific scholar.

David Fairweather Foxon 1923–2001

David Fairweather Foxon (1923–2001), a Fellow of the British Academy, published English Verse 1701–1750: a Catalogue, a book that not only took a long leap forward into a new century; it also provided a cross-section through the record of all British books and books printed abroad in English in a period in which the total number of books, periodicals, and ephemera began to increase exponentially. The period was also one in which the whole concept of authorship and the relationship between author and the book trade changed substantially, as a result of the Copyright Act (1709). Foxon was born in Paignton, the son of a Methodist minister. Bletchley Park was a crucial experience for him, socially and intellectually. He met a variety of gifted academics, some eccentric, mostly from Oxford or Cambridge, at an early age; it gave him training in codebreaking; and it introduced him to his future wife. Foxon was involved in the recataloguing of the British Museum Library, a gigantic undertaking that had begun in 1929.

John Macquarrie 1919–2007

John Macquarrie (1919–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the foremost Anglican systematic theologian of the twentieth century. His many books cover a wide range of topics, from studies of existentialist philosophy to expositions of systematic Christian theology, writings on mysticism and world religion, and analyses of ethical thought. Macquarrie was always a theologian of the church, using a philosophical vocabulary that united philosophical idealism, existentialism, and Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy in an original and fruitful way. His masterpiece was the 1966 Principles of Christian Theology, which works through almost every aspect of Christian doctrine in the light of the concepts of human nature and of God that he had forged from idealism, from Martin Heidegger, and from an increasingly sacramental and mystical approach to Christian faith. In 1970, Macquarrie was offered, without his prior knowledge, the Lady Margaret Chair of Divinity at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He received various honours that testify to the high regard in which he was held both in America and in Britain.

Terence Wilmot Hutchison 1912–2007

Terence Wilmot Hutchison (1912–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a historian of economics, methodologist, and acerbic critic of hubris and pretension amongst economists. He was born at Bournemouth and grew up in London. Hutchison's father was the flamboyant and much married Robert Langton Douglas, while his mother was Grace Hutchison. It was as a classicist that he went to the University of Cambridge in 1931. But Hutchison quickly lost interest in a subject that seemed to him to have little relevance to the economic turmoil of the world, and switched to economics, graduating in 1934 with a First. He left Cambridge in 1934 and registered as an occasional student at the London School of Economics (LSE). This chapter presents a biography of Hutchison and also narrates his trips to Germany, Iraq, and India, as well as his stints at the University of Hull, LSE, and the University of Birmingham.

Peter Astbury Brunt 1917–2005

Peter Astbury Brunt (1917–2005), a Fellow of the British Academy, served in the Ministry of Shipping (later War Transport), alongside his undergraduate contemporary and friend, Basil Dickinson. After his release from the Ministry, he took up at the beginning of 1946 a Senior Demyship at Magdalen College, to which he had been elected the previous autumn, and the Craven Fellowship that had been awarded to him in 1939, choosing as a topic for research the relations between governed and governors in the Roman Empire, and set off for the British School at Rome. It was Roman Stoicism that claimed more and more of Brunt's attention. He was happy to admit the influence on his thinking of Geoffrey de Ste Croix, despite the differences in their political views. One of the themes that occupied Brunt during the period from 1951 to 1968 was that of ancient slavery. During his seventeen years in the University of Oxford, he undertook major administrative tasks both for his college and for the university.