Bernard Arthur Owen Williams 1929–2003

Bernard Williams is considered by distinguished contemporaries from many fields as one of the great, inspirational humanists of his time. Aside from his terrifying brilliance, his dazzling speed of mind and extraordinary range of understanding, his zest, and his glittering wit, he was also admired for the deep humanity that had infused his life and work, and the seriousness with which he had tried to transform the role of the moral philosopher. The paradoxical combination of exhilaration and pessimism, of complete facility in the academic exercises of philosophy juxtaposed with an almost tragic sense of the resistance that the human clay offers to theory and analysis, let alone to recipes and panaceas, made Williams a unique, and uniquely admired, figure in his generation.

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper 1914–2003

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper has been called both a Whig and a Tory historian, a distinction he shares, perhaps fittingly, with Hume. He was a Whig insofar as he believed in a plural, liberal society, in constitutional checks and balances, and in social counterweights to centres of power. He was a Tory insofar as he recognised the power of traditional institutions, if they are kept up to the mark, to channel constructive human characteristics and restrain destructive ones. However, neither the Whig nor the Tory label, nor any other, captures Trevor-Roper's idiosyncratic essence. In everything he was his own man. The historians of Trevor-Roper's own time whom he most admired were not the panjandrums of the academic community but figures eccentric to it, whom he discovered for himself: above all Gerald Brenan and Frances Yates, neither of whom had been trained as a historian.

John Edgar Stevens 1921–2002

John Stevens had a benign and constructive presence among British musical and literary scholars for several generations, beginning in the late 1940s when he was made a Bye-Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and extending virtually to the day of his demise on 14 February 2002. His eminence as a musicologist and the exalted reputation he left behind amongst his musicological colleagues seem all the more remarkable when one considers that he passed his life as a university teacher of English literature. From 1954 until 1974 Stevens was University Lecturer in English in the University of Cambridge, then Reader in English and Musical History from 1974–8. In 1978 he was appointed Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English in the University. Despite Stevens' profound and sympathetic musicianship, it was the critical traditions of English literary studies that shaped his intellectual temper.

Stuart Newton Hampshire 1914–2004

Stuart Hampshire was one of the most interesting philosophers of the last half-century. He wrote extensively on ethics and politics during the second half of his career, but everything he wrote reflected the concerns that drew him to Aristotle, Spinoza, and Freud at the beginning of his career; and although he was never a Marxist, he never lost his respect for Marx's analysis of the conflicts and tensions inherent in any economically complex society. The last book Hampshire published in his lifetime was called, characteristically, Justice is Conflict, having begun with the title Justice is Strife. To the very end of his life, he wrote with an extraordinary freshness and lightness of touch, and preserved an open-minded curiosity about the human condition in all its aspects that would have been remarkable in someone fifty years younger.

Henry William Rawson Wade 1918–2004

Sir William Wade dominated two diverse areas of law – real property and administrative law – by writing the textbooks that became a source of first reference for students, scholars, practitioners, and judges. While he was the leading academic land lawyer of his generation, he will principally be remembered as one of the two scholars who did most to revitalise administrative law during the 20th century. Wade's scholarly career lasted over sixty years, and he remained active into his eighties. He wrote with penetrating clarity and an elegant and memorable turn of phrase, often expressing himself in trenchant terms. Wade did this both when grappling with the technicalities of property law and, in the heady atmosphere of constitutional principles, with the respective roles of executive government and the courts.

Peter Frederick Strawson 1919–2006

Peter Frederick Strawson's life as a philosopher was spent mostly in positions at Oxford, first as a Fellow at University College, and then, after 1968, as Ryle's successor as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, at Magdalen College. Writing primarily about the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy, he succeeded in redirecting Oxford philosophy away from the limitations that had to some extent been accepted under the influence of J. L. Austin, towards a re-engagement with some traditional and also some new abstract philosophical issues. Strawson established from the early 1950s onwards a pre-eminence within Oxford philosophy, both through his publications but also by his quite exceptional, although never brutal, critical abilities. Simultaneously, he established himself as one of the leading philosophers in the world.

Robert Duguid Forrest Pring-Mill 1924–2005

Robert Pring-Mill was one of a generation of young men whose education was interrupted by the Second World War and who went to university as mature students after demobilisation. In Hispanic Studies, as in other subject areas, it was academics of that generation who laid the foundations of the modern discipline, and Pring-Mill, an all-rounder who firmly believed that his various research activities were mutually enriching, had the distinction of making a significant contribution to several of its branches. In the course of his career, but primarily in the early stages, he produced a body of studies that earned him recognition as one of the world's foremost authorities on the work of medieval poet, mystic, philosopher, and theologian Ramon Lhull. Pring-Mill's most substantial and most important work in the area of Golden Age literature was his writings on Spain's greatest dramatist, Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

Peter Brian Herrenden Birks 1941–2004

Peter Birks was one of the most influential legal scholars of his generation. He owed that influence to the admiration in which his rigorous and innovative thinking was held by lawyers and judges, not only in this country, but throughout the Commonwealth and in Europe. Birks was most widely known through his writings, but in Oxford, in particular, his reputation also rested on his teaching, especially in the famous restitution seminars that he conducted with various colleagues over three decades. He had an enormous impact on the law of restitution/unjust enrichment both in the universities and in the courts. The ‘Birksian school of thought’ has pursued, and will continue to pursue, rational transparency and elegant coherence in legal reasoning, not only in the law of restitution, but across English private law generally.

Alan Harold Williams 1927–2005

Alan Williams was, by common consent, the leading health economist in Britain. Indeed, it is in large part due to him that there is a community of health economics for anyone to lead. Williams was renowned for the logical rigour of his thinking, for his passionate commitment to the principle of universal health care supplied according to need, for his determination to ensure that health-service resources are used to the best effect, and for his evangelical sense of mission in advocating the use of the quality-adjusted life year as a measure of health-service effectiveness. He was also famous for the notice on his desk – later moved to his door so that callers would be forewarned of what to expect – with the injunction: ‘Be reasonable do it my way’. That so many people remember this message shows that it was something more than an office joke.

John Malcolm Sabine Pasley 1926–2004

Malcolm Pasley achieved a unique authority as a British scholar in a major area of German literary scholarship, the work of Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Good scholars are often blessed with serendipity, the tendency to chance upon what they need without actually looking for it or even knowing it was there. As with candidates for promotion to General, there is sense in Napoleon's question ‘Is he lucky?’. A chance encounter gave Pasley's work a new and unexpected direction; indeed, it turned what would always have been intellectually distinguished into something unquestionably central, and directed his meticulous mind to the most basic literary issues.