George David Norman Worswick 1916–2001

David Worswick dedicated his life to economics and the analysis of economic policy, which resulted in several honours. In 1975 he received a D.Sc. from City University and was elected a Fellow of the Academy in 1979 — and from 1986/7 to 1988/9 he served as Chairman of its Section 9. In 1981 he was awarded the CBE. He also had a lively and fulfilling domestic life. He married Sylvia Walsh in 1940 and had three children. Their Oxford house was a home from home for many a student. He represented, not only the intellectual commitment of a generation of British economists, but also just about all the best features of a man in public life in Britain in his time.

Richard William Southern 1912–2001

People with a logical turn of mind say that the history of the world can be summarised in a sentence. A précis of mediaval historian Richard William Southern's work made in that spirit would identify two characteristics, one housed inside the other, and both quite apart from the question of its quality as a work of art. The first is his sympathy for a particular kind of medieval churchman, a kind who combined deep thought about faith with practical action. This characteristic fits inside another, touching Southern's historical vision as a whole. Its genesis is traceable to those few seconds in his teens when he ‘quarrelled’ with his father about the Renaissance. The intuition that moved him to do so became a historical fides quaerens intellectum. Reflection on Southern's life work leaves us with an example of the service an historian can perform for his contemporary world, as a truer self-perception seeps into the common consciousness by way of a lifetime of teaching and writing, spreading out through the world (all Southern's books were translated into one or more foreign language).

Henry Mathison Pelling 1920–1997

Henry Pelling enjoyed the deep respect of his professional colleagues, primarily in Britain and the anglophone world and also notably in Japan. His oeuvre secured him a reputation as the foremost empirical labour historian of his generation. Between 1954 and 1963 he published no fewer than nine substantial books, despite his complaints at the way that Oxford teaching duties ate into his time as a writing scholar. Having made himself the unrivalled authority on the history of the labour movement, Pelling had branched out in the 1960s into the new field of electoral history.

Henry Royston Loyn 1922–2000

Henry Loyn conveyed his enthusiasm for early medieval history and English culture to generations of Cardiff and London students. He had a wonderful gift for friendship and for bringing out the best in people. His scholarship was devoted to transmitting understanding of English history, rather than to changing interpretations of it. It is as a teacher and a wonderful friend that he will be remembered. He left a positive mark on all the institutions he served.

Francis Harry Hinsley 1918–1998

Sir Harry Hinsley was a cryptanalyst, an historian and an effective university administrator. He was fascinated by the progression of peace and war since states had become the most common form of political organisation among human societies, and their near universality had induced the creation of an international system among them. Here are to be found the main thrusts of his three core books: Power and the Pursuit of Peace (CUP, 1963), Sovereignty (Watts, 1966), and Nationalism and the International System. Of these, Power and the Pursuit of Peace is the most substantial, Sovereignty the most important and original of his writings, while Nationalism represents a further working out of a very important theme from Power and the Pursuit of Peace.

Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond 1907–2001

Nick Hammond stands in a class of his own among Fellows of the Academy. His scholarly achievement was shaped by many untypical factors. His lifelong devotion to education, in every sense and at every level from the secondary onwards, gave it an unusual direction: until late in his life, much of his research had been driven by his teaching. His boldness in venturing into widely diverse branches of Classics, together with his intensely personal view of the activity of research, is reflected in his own unclassifiable status; the fact that he had had no formal research supervisor of his own, nor was later in a position to attract a large following of research pupils, accentuated this. With little doubt, his best work was to be found in the fields where not only his exhaustive knowledge of the ancient sources, but also his personal virtues and experiences had full rein: the volume on Epirus, the trilogy on Macedonia, and the best of his battle-reconstructions where he had walked over the landscape.

Arthur Geoffrey Dickens 1910–2001

For many students of history in the later 20th century, the name of A. G. Dickens was synonymous with the English Reformation. He was, however, a scholar of diverse and cultured interests, with a desire to disseminate his learning to the widest possible audience. There is a clear progression in his academic career from its pioneering beginnings in the use of local archives, through national history, to the European studies that occupied his later years. Two of his books which have stood the test of time as widely-read teaching books are Lollards and Protestants and The English Reformation.

Max Beloff 1913–1999

Max Beloff was both a historian and political scientist, which makes a fair assessment of his work on both fields difficult. This is in part because whilst much of what he wrote was history, much of it was also what might be called ‘public affairs from an historical standpoint’. Inevitably this meant that what was intended to be straightforward historical analysis sometimes ran the risk of being too heavily influenced by current preoccupations arising in the sphere of public affairs. Yet this idea that the historian should be concerned with public affairs was very much to the fore in the 1930s when Beloff was at Oxford, and to some extent his ideal became and remained that of the scholar-historian who brings his knowledge to bear on the problems and controversies of his own times. What stands out in all Beloff's writing — historical or otherwise — is his fluency, clarity of presentation, and cogency in getting across the principal points he wants to make.

Oliver Robert Gurney 1911–2001

Oliver Robert Gurney's long career in Hittite studies spanned the greater part of the existence of this academic subject. He was a man of the greatest courtesy and integrity. A natural reserve might make him appear aloof at first, but behind that lay a warm and humorous personality. He served as president of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara. He also served as member of Council for the British School of Archaeology in Iraq for many years. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1959. He became Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters in 1976 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Higher Letters in the University of Chicago in 1991. He was Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford from 1963, and was also a Freeman in the City of Norwich.

Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich 1909–2001

Ernst Gombrich was a prominent art historian in the UK and probably its best known humanist scholar during the last forty years of the 20th century. The status derived from two apparently unrelated features of his work: he wrote deliberately for a wide audience, most obviously in his highly successful Story of Art first published in 1950, while his standing in the academic world, both within and beyond the field of art history, was established by Art and Illusion published in 1960; here he reconstructed some of the basic concepts in which the development of the visual arts could be discussed, introducing into the literature of art history a greatly enriched understanding of perceptual psychology. The two factors — his address to a general audience and his conceptual innovations in Art and Illusion — were intimately related because his use of experiments from the perceptual psychologists, appealing to effects which his readers and lecture audiences could test on themselves, lessened the sense that art was an arcane activity isolated from our everyday world.