John W. Burrow

19 Jul

Obituary by Donald Winch,
2009

John Burrow, who taught at Sussex from 1969 to 1995, died of cancer on 3 November [2009] at his home in Witney, Oxfordshire. Sussex was the first university in this country to offer degrees in intellectual history, and John was the first to occupy the chair in this branch of history created for him in 1981. He held this post until he moved to the Chair of European Thought at Oxford in 1995, prior to his retirement in 2000. Among several other honours that came his way was election as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1986.

John was the first person to be appointed to a 'contextual' post in the School of Social Sciences, where he taught the school's third-year course on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, otherwise known as Concepts, Methods, and Values (CMV). He had already published a path-breaking book, Evolution and Society; A Study in Victorian Social Theory (1966), on the pervasive influence of a variety of evolutionary theories on the social sciences during the nineteenth century. It was to herald the arrival of a more sophisticated way of writing the history of the social sciences, one that did not treat the past as being of interest only in so far as it anticipated the present. Alongside two Sussex colleagues with whom he taught CMV, Stefan Collini and Donald Winch, he went on to write a book on That Noble Science of Politics (1983) that extended this approach and laid the foundation for what later became known as the 'Sussex school of intellectual history'. John's unparalleled knowledge of the Whig and Burkean component within English liberalism provided him with the theme of his Carlyle lectures at Oxford, Whigs and Liberals; Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (1988).

John was also one of the leading British exponents of historiography, the history of history. In 1981 he published a book on A Liberal Descent; Victorian Historians and the English Past that was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History. Based on his contribution to a series of centenary lectures given at Sussex in the 1970s, he was later to write a short and incisive book on Edward Gibbon (1985). The climax to this side of John's interests came in his last major work, A History of Histories (2007), covering the entire period from Herodotus and Thucydides to trends in twentieth-century history.

There was always a strong European component to John's interests. It was first expressed in a translation of and commentary on Wilhelm von Humboldt's Limits of State Action (1969); and was to blossom into The Crisis of Reason (2000), a wide-ranging study of European scientific thinking and cultural and artistic movements during the period 1848 to 1914.

Although John left Sussex in 1995, he retained a link through the Centre for Intellectual History, which he supported by participating in its symposia and as a member of its advisory board. One of his last visits to Sussex was to attend the inaugural lecture given in 2008 by Knud Haakonssen, the present holder of the Chair of Intellectual History to which John's scholarship had first lent lustre. John is remembered with love and affection by several generations of Sussex students, and by colleagues with whom he taught and served in the old schools of Social Sciences and English and American studies. In any future history of this university his career will be cited as vindication of the fluidity of the early structures and the distinction and distinctiveness of what could flourish within them.

The John Burrow Collection

Thousand Manuscripts Blog

John Burrow on Duncan Forbes

All of John W. Burrow’s unpublished papers, a number of his audio lectures, and some autobiographical material has been made available in the Intellectual History Archive.

Memorials

February 6, 2010.
We are here today to celebrate the Sussex John Burrow, and in my case that means going back to the years between 1974 and 1986 when he and I were colleagues in the Intellectual History group.
Subject-Groups in those days enjoyed a good deal of autonomy about their internal arrangements, and our collective taste in administrative matters ran towards cheerful minimalism. These groups were supposed to have regular meetings whose momentous doings were recorded in regular minutes, to be scrutinised by higher powers. We didn't much care for having meetings; our favoured venue for transacting business was the steps of the Gardner Bar on Tuesday lunchtimes. Pints of Harveys' bitter were what, in the argot of the day, would have been called their material base. But we quickly twigged that the fact of not having any meetings was no impediment to the production of impressive-looking minutes. John and I had good sport in writing these, creating ghostly entities such as 'proposals' which were 'carried unanimously' after 'extensive discussion'. It delighted John to think that insinuating these works of fiction into the archives of Sussex House might one day be the means of taking revenge on those hard-faced administrative historians who were prone to lord it over mere intellectual historians because the latter could not base their conclusions on 'reliable archival records'.
In those days he and I often taught seminars jointly, an experience from which, as you can imagine, I derived a good part of my education. John could be a brilliant teacher: he only required that the students be willing and curious, however ignorant initially - this was perhaps one reason why he later so much enjoyed his teaching in the USA at Berkeley and Williams. What he hated was that strand of sullen resentment which, alas, when couched in the idiom of fashionable radicalism, was not unknown among Sussex students in the 1970s. But as long as the students were disposed to be interested, John had several natural gifts as a teacher - that extraordinary quickness of mind, that effortless finding of an apt simile or metaphor with which to illuminate otherwise opaque ideas, that quite exceptional cultural range. He also had human qualities to which, if disenchantment hadn't set in prematurely, students responded, including an utter lack of pomposity or any standing upon status, and an infectious vitality. Perhaps his command of the procedures and instruments of pedagogy was not always quite up to the highest QAA standards, but those students who were really listening - listening by the students was, in practice, the dominant mode in John's seminars - those students got an incomparably rich guided tour through the relevant books and ideas.
Curiously, for such a naturally eloquent speaker, he was not always so successful as a lecturer. In a class or tutorial he could respond to contributions by students in ways that deftly helped them out of their ignorance or confusion, but he didn't always manage to work any such implicitly dialogic element into his lectures and the students could become restive. Although it doesn't deserve to be called a paradox, it may be mildly surprising that someone who was so unstoppably a performer in conversational settings, and visibly enjoyed being so, was not more of a success on the podium. A certain physical modesty or reticence may have played a part, as may his use of a fully-written script that was not always immediately easy for the audience to follow - or, I might add, easy even for him to decipher.
John enjoyed the raffish charm of Brighton, and he loved the Sussex countryside, but I am afraid it has to be said that in his later years here he did not exactly love the University of Sussex. The treatment of the intellectual historians during these years by the History Subject Group and by the higher administration did not encourage warm feelings, but there can be no doubt that, whatever his ambivalent emotions about the place, the years of his prime were spent at Sussex. This seems to me especially true of the 1970s and early 1980s, when his personal star was rising, his young children were intensely rewarding, and the institutional setting was stimulating and congenial. It is the John of this period that I most like to remember - John at his vigorous, interested, quick, responsive, best, so full of fun and so very, very clever.
Although he was to spend the final five years of his career at Oxford, it is worth remembering that after his retirement, he and Diane intended to move back to Sussex, and perhaps only the falling-through at the last moment of a house sale deflected them. John was happy to have the honorary title of Research Professor at Sussex, happy to continue as editor-in chief of History of European Ideas, where he exercised what we might call his light-touch editorial style - at least Richard Whatmore and Brian Young might be inclined to call it that - and he always longed for the soothing balm of the Sussex Downs on a fine summer's day.
Those who only met John on social occasions might have had little inkling of the melancholy, verging on despair, that was sometimes manifested to his close friends. On the whole, it was not John's way to take up arms against his sea of troubles. His was not what you would call an activist's temperament. He instinctively preferred the pleasures of comprehensive complaint to the labour of piecemeal reform. Most of us will recall times when John reduced us to helpless laughter by turning some personal misfortune into high farce. It was, of course, a way of coping. He had his pride, though it was usually well hidden, and exercising his wit and inventiveness on circumstances and setbacks in life which were sometimes depressing or embarrassing for him to contemplate or admit was a way of mastering them - was, in Nietzschean vein, an assertion of the will to power, a search for the medium through which he could flourish and even dominate.
Minor classics in the genre that I recall include his interview with the bank manager about his billowing overdraft - 'He said I'd been very naughty and I said Oh, if only...' - or his comment on the review editor who had written wondering whether John had yet had an opportunity to decide whether he might care to review the book that had been sent him some six months earlier - 'the impudence of the fellow, he's as bad as Disraeli's tailor!' - and, one of my all-time favorites, his appearing one day in a shabby, battered overcoat that reached capaciously almost to the ground and his pre-empting any comment with the Noel Coward-ish remark: 'It almost shakes one's faith in natural selection to disover in mid-life that one's father is so much taller than oneself.'
Just occasionally, this rich capacity to convert embarrassing or distressing experience into hilarious narrative would assume full literary form, a rough draft having first been sketched and polished in conversation. Pride of place here, I think, has to go to the occasion when, walking at night from Cooksbridge station up to Donald and Dolly's house, he managed to leave the pavement, lose his footing, and end up in a water-filled ditch. In fact, he liked to say that it was a miracle that he hadn't ended his days face down in several feet of brackish Sussex ditchwater, and the verbal prompt of 'miracle' having been supplied, he proceeded to develop an elaborate conceit about how, in a more pious age, the site would have become a shrine for pilgrims, eager to celebrate the miraculous preservation of a truly holy man. This led me, in a return of serve that always gave us both so much pleasure, to provide a piece of mock-learned Quellenkritik challenging the authenticity of the surviving evidence for 'the so-called miracle of St Jean de la Fosse'. Indeed, I suggested, further research would show that the story was a later fabrication designed to cover the disappearance of a debtor called John of Hove who later re-appeared in the guise of Jean de Bailleul, preaching to small congregations in Oxford. John loved this sort of thing - he was, along with so much else, a very talented parodist - and he fired back what purported to be an expos, of the sinister mafiosi connections of the doubtful figure known as 'Collini', who was, he pointed out, understood to have held clandestine meetings in New York with a shadowy 'third man' using the code-name 'Burrinchini', and who, in an organisation called simply 'IH', worked hand-in-glove with a group that may have had links with an Irish Republican cell since its leading members were known as Burke, Moran, and Shiel.
Although I am here deliberately speaking in personal and informal vein, I think it is impossible not at least to attempt to say something about his extraordinarily impressive achievements as a writer. What seems perhaps even clearer in retrospect than at the time, though it was certainly recognised by many good judges, was the consistent way in which John's work was marked by a combination of originality, literary distinction, and intellectual penetration. A few people may be a little surprised at my emphasising this third quality; the gracefulness of John's prose together with his geniality and amusingness in person may have misled some into under-estimating the sheer power and speed of his mind. It is also true that in his books he tended not to parade the distinctiveness and importance of his insights or to spend much time belabouring the failings of other scholars. But the originality, the distinction, and the penetration are, I think, as evident in the architecture of his books as in the local detailing. For illustration, I only need to point to what were, I believe, his three best books. Each of the three is very different from the others, but how many scholars of his generation could, in these three genres, match the achievement of: Evolution and Society, A Liberal Descent, and A History of Histories?
In the course of John's career, the standing of intellectual history in the academic culture of this country improved immeasurably. It would be a difficult and delicate task to attempt to identify John's contribution to this transformation, and I think it would anyway be right to say that he tended to attract admirers rather than followers. But there can surely be no doubt that the sheer unignorable quality of John's work and the esteem in which he was held by other kinds of historians and by specialists in cognate disciplines were in themselves very important contributions to the enhanced status of the subject.
It is difficult for me even now to try to say anything about what I loved in John as a man and a friend without risking the embarrassment of tears. And anyway, no matter how many abstract nouns I string together, the net can never capture the butterfly. Of course: warmth, wit, openness, responsiveness, loyalty, and yes, of course, one of the most consistently interesting, reflective, creative minds any of us could ever hope to encounter. But perhaps a very long close friendship is a little like a very long close marriage, in that the habits of intimacy are so ingrained, the compatibilities so deep, that in trying to provide a publicly intelligible assessment of the other person one risks failing to convey at all what made them so special, and what makes their loss a partial dissolution of one's own identity. Here I think, too, of William Empson's generous acknowledgement of T.S. Eliot - 'I do not know for certain how much of my mind he invented' - but John shaped so much more than one's mind through the delicacy of his sympathies, the generosity of his feelings, the sheer joy of his company. The nouns go on, but John, alas, does not. I loved him dearly; I miss him terribly. There is now a vacancy in our lives that no one could ever fill.
February 6, 2010.
I got to know John well in a way typical of Sussex as it once was: we taught together on a history-literature topic. I taught together with what often seems to me almost every historian at Sussex, and my experience with John was both the most successful and one of the least successful. Least, because we agreed so much; I don't remember any really fierce arguments or ideological clashes between us, and no doubt this disappointed some of our students. Most, of course, because I learned so much from him: he left me convinced that I now didn't need to read Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham, since I had heard his wonderfully lucid and witty exposition of their thought. Most of what either of us said could have been said by the other - most but not all. What John was hesitant in talking about was the Ode to the West Wind or Kubla Khan - nice and short; whereas my ignorance covered lots of very long books which John had always read. Indeed, when he was studying Victorian historians, he liked to think of himself as the Stakhanovite among his colleagues - if you measured productivity by the number of pages read. I remember explaining to the students that I had views on what the English felt in the early 19th C, and John knew what they thought, but that we might be a little unreliable on what actually happened (though of course we were more reliable than the students were).
You get to know your colleagues in several ways - in conversation, through joint teaching (a more formal kind of conversation) and by listening to them lecture. I had the pleasure of hearing John lecture twice: both were memorable and taught me a lot, and the two experiences have now run together in my mind. One was his inaugural lecture as Professor of Intellectual History, a model of what an inaugural should be, which explained what he believed intellectual history was and discussed what it should be called. The English faculty at Cambridge used to offer, when John and I were undergraduates, courses in Life Literature and Thought: since they were taught by literary scholars they were really courses in literature, with a few genuflexions towards the background that really belonged to social historians (who dealt with Life) and historians of ideas (who dealt with Thought). John explained that this background was his foreground: in the nicest possible way, he was turning the tables on us, pointing out that what mattered less to us actually mattered more to him.
The other formal lecture I heard John give was on Gibbon (no doubt marking his bicentenary) and of this I remember only one thing, which I shall never forget: that after reading a magnificent bit of sonorous Gibbonian prose to show how splendidly Gibbon could write, he confessed that he had just written it himself, I felt ashamed that I had never tried to write a Keats Ode.
In a way, there is no need for me to remember and recite episodes from John's life, since he has done it so well himself. Towards the end he wrote, and his friends printed, a fascinating and witty autobiography, which contains one of the best accounts of post-war Britain I have ever read. I remember the British Restaurants with affection, providing (as they were meant to) cheap and wholesome lunches, but the one in Exeter must have been well below standard. It can be forgiven, however, because of the delectable prose it drew from the reminiscing John, claiming he was offered 'chips fried in oil clearly recycled after previous use for some industrial purpose - drained perhaps from the sumps of written off Spitfires, making the cannibalisation process reciprocal.'
John's autobiography is not only entertaining, it also contains a serious and disturbing account of the academic controversy he was inadvertently involved in at the end of his career, and which I discussed with him while it was on. It is such an interesting and such a disturbing story, that I make no apology for briefly telling it here, to an academic audience. A wealthy German industrialist endowed a chair of European thought at Oxford and John was its first and (as it turned out) its last occupant. The grandfather of the donor had been a supporter and financer of the Nazi government, and when this fact was discovered by the press they cast accuracy to the winds and denounced Oxford, Balliol College (which had given him a fellowship) and sometimes John himself for accepting what they called 'Nazi Gold'. The German donor was so upset by the denunciations that he withdrew his support, but since John had already been appointed, Oxford University found the money to continue the chair - at least during John's tenure: when he retired, the chair was abolished. Our splendid English free press does not come well out of this story, but Oxford University, said to be the home of reaction and lost causes, does - as in my view does John, who naturally realised that the remit of a chair in European Thought could include discussion of the question of its setting up. The full story has been told by John himself - and will perhaps one day be the subject of a doctoral thesis in European thought which John, alas, will not be alive to read. His own account of the episode contains one sentence which I would like to end on. The Jewish Chronicle asked him if he would have accepted the chair if he had known the source of its funding, but did not print John's very characteristic reply: 'Well, you have to remember that I am a coward, and being a coward probably not. But if I had not been one, I think I would.' I remember, as many of you do, John Burrow as a brilliant scholar, a devoted family man, a good friend, and a man brave enough to lay claim to cowardice.
February 6, 2010.
Like Laurence Lerner, I taught an interdisciplinary School course with John. It was on 'Faith, Doubt and Science in Victorian Literature', and thanks to John it was great fun. We once had an essay from a student who had been reading about Mr Pooter in Diary of a Nobody before writing about Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean. With admirable consistency the novel was attributed to that unknown writer Walter Pooter. I don't think either of us was ever able to take Pater entirely seriously after that. John loved many of the texts we covered, and his enthusiasm was infectious. I gradually realised that one of the reasons he wrote so well was that he had a very good eye and ear for good writing, whether it was Darwin on there being grandeur in the evolutionary view of life, or Frazer in The Golden Bough on the death and renewal of religions in the Alban Hills above Rome.
John was also a very good listener: he seldom took notes but when a student or a colleague had introduced a topic or presented an argument he could go straight to the heart of it, pick out what mattered and very efficiently carry forward the discussion.
He could also be an efficient administrator, though he would have cheerfully denied it. He endured rather than enjoyed being Director of Graduate Studies, or DoGS, in Arts and Social Studies. I was his Deputy, the Deputy DoGS. The job involved trudging over to an office in Arts D which he always referred to as the dark tower, seeing himself as Browning's 'Childe Roland' ('Childe Roland to the dark tower came'). He had succeeded a very active, hands-on, Director, but John had a different, more relaxed style. This was a bit alarming at first but after a bit I realised that this could work just as well and ensured that there was time for the really important and difficult problems.
The efficient use of time could be a bit unnerving. I was once asked to respond to a conference paper John was giving in Bristol. Each paper-giver had been asked to send a copy to the respondent well in advance, but John didn't have time to do so. He was in Oxford by this time so he suggested we should meet at Reading station and travel to Bristol together. To the bemusement of some of the other passengers on the very crowded train he then talked me through a trial version of the still-unwritten paper he was going to deliver the following day. Somehow or other the adrenalin rush he was depending on kicked in overnight, and the paper as delivered was polished, erudite and witty, as it always was.
A splendid historian, a splendidly humane and entertaining writer and teacher and a profoundly cultivated man, John was also a generous and very supportive colleague and friend. I am very glad I knew him.
February 6, 2010.
John was one of those rare creatures who claimed to remember the sights and sounds of being born. He certainly had an acute sense of the shapes, styles, and smells of the natural and built environments in which he found himself. With this came a strong sense of identification with places that were especially congenial to him. Having spent his first two decades in Devon and Cornwall, he was proud to think of himself as a West Country man. During the next decade and more he became a Cambridge man who tacked on to that a few more years living deeper still in East Anglia at Norwich. Coming from the West, he couldn't get used to the sun setting over land rather than the sea. Several decades later, as many of us here remember with some regret, John decided to spend the last five years of his career in a university located somewhere in the South-West Midlands. But having noticed these rival claims on John's allegiances and affections, it is far more than local patriotism that leads me to assert that he was one of ours -- a Sussex man.
John spent 26 years at this university, raised his family in Brighton and Hove, and laid the foundation for the international reputation he enjoys as intellectual historian and historiographer extraordinary while here. The congregation today testifies to the range of friendships he formed. From a Sussex point of view the gathering would be nearer completion if that prince of evolutionary biologists, John Maynard Smith, was still with us. The two Johns had the West Country and Charles Darwin in common; and much else besides. They enjoyed what other Sussex teachers of that generation enjoyed, what John described as 'the absence of disciplinary tribalism'. There can be no question that it was this feature of Sussex life that allowed John and the branch of history of which he was master to put down roots and thrive here. Life became more difficult for him when disciplinary tribalism, not least within history, reasserted itself.
In addition to Sussex friends and colleagues, John loved the seaside and Downland walks, churches, and pubs. It follows from the last of these that he was partial to Harvey's best bitter. Over the years we consumed our share of that excellent brew over lunches taken on the steps of the Gardner Centre. I'm glad too that I lugged what seemed like a firkin of the stuff to Lords cricket ground last August for what proved to be John's final taste of it. (It couldn't have been a firkin, of course, because that is 9 imperial gallons: even in our prime we couldn't consume that much. The combination of old age and weight just made it seem like a quarter of a barrel.)
It was in Sussex too that John - with a bit more of the good fortune that seemed to desert him at key stages of his life - would like to have spent his final years. The years that should have been available to him have been all-too rapidly and cruelly foreshortened. When thinking about what to say today I've had difficulty in finding the right tense: John surely is not was. I kept thinking that if this was an honorary degree ceremony, as it might well have been, we could all say the things we now want to say, but do so in a mood of celebration rather than sadness and loss. I hope that some of the photos and other memorabilia downstairs will revive happier memories. We will also use the internet, a method of communication that John treated as a malevolent force, to put some of his private writings and gift for pastiche on the Centre for Intellectual History's website.
In jest John used to complain that in coming to Sussex in 1968 he entered a world -- as the Reverend Robert Malthus once put it -- that was 'already possessed'. He would indicate that I was one of the possessors and add some irrelevant observation about me having been a boxer as a schoolboy to give the impression that he had been cowed or bullied. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. I'll admit, however, that after I'd read the account of his childhood in the wonderful autobiographical memoir we were able to get printed just before he died, I recognized that I was just the kind of 'street boy' his more genteel upbringing was designed to protect him from. On the other hand, as a form of revenge perhaps, I was to learn to my cost many years later that John was one of those people from whom one should be wary of buying a second-hand car. Along with Dolly, a new bride at the time, I did just that in Canberra, of all places, making even short car trips into the outback far more of an adventure than was absolutely necessary. The recompense for this was to be on the list of recipients for John's round-robin letters, in one of which he described Australian cassowaries as looking like nosy Bertrand Russells poking their heads through the windows of cars.
In 1967 I had no idea what sort of man Mr Burrow was when I wrote to him to express my admiration for his first book on Evolution and Society and to invite him to give a lecture in the contextual course I convened, Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences, CMV for short. The book exemplified the anti-Whig or non-teleological approach to the history of the social sciences that I was trying to follow myself. In brief, it treated the history of these troublesome disciplines as having had a historically and intellectually interesting past rather than one that was a feeble anticipation of what contemporary social scientists currently wanted to believe about themselves. After his second visit in the following year I popped the question: if I could arrange it, would he accept what was probably the first post created at Sussex solely to meet the needs of a contextual course rather than a major subject? The rest, as they say, is history, though it was a history that still had to be made.
Seducing John from the University of East Anglia, with the support of Barry Supple as PVC, was the best thing I ever did as Dean of the School of Social Sciences. On reflection, bearing in mind that in those heady days of student revolt when much of one's time was spent on negative or defensive things, like preventing the house from being burnt down, I sometimes felt that it was the only good thing, the only constructive thing I did. John's eager acceptance of the offer set on foot a string of lasting consequences for him and for us. It gave a boost to the Intellectual History degree that had been started by Michael Moran, James Shiel, and Peter Burke; and in 1981 it allowed John to become the first professor of that branch of history and to help give it that Sussex complexion outsiders have noticed. He moved from SOC to ENGAM in the 1970s, but his teaching remained heavily concentrated on contextual courses, including MEM, Modern European Mind, in EURO. Visitors will have to forgive resort to all this outmoded shorthand about Sussex entities that became obsolete a couple of managerial regimes ago. Natives and ex-natives will know what I'm talking about, and it underlines just how closely John's career was connected with what was peculiar to Sussex in those days.
To begin with, although we were strict contemporaries and fellow grammar-school products, it wasn't obvious what a Devon-bred Cambridge historian and a South London- born economist educated at the London School of Economics, with Ivy League trimmings supplied by Princeton, had in common. There was a shared interest in the Scottish Enlightenment which involved, quite by chance, one of John's Cambridge tutors, Duncan Forbes, a figure I knew only in print. Again, purely by chance, John's external examiner for his PhD, Michael Oakeshott, had been one of the few teachers at LSE whose lectures I had attended faithfully; they dealt with the history of political thought, another field in which John and I later cooperated. It also proved true that both of us, though lacking any proper education as scientists or philosophers, were much taken by the natural sciences and by what modern philosophers had to say about their modes of inquiry and explanation.
Later we discovered -- partly as a result of a pair of centenary lectures we gave here in 1976 - that the friendship that existed between our respective eighteenth-century protagonists, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon, was matched in our own alliance. One of the issues on which these two sceptics found common cause was their use of the idea of unintended consequences to express the ironies and moral ambivalences that one encounters when seeking causal explanations for human behaviour in complex social and historical settings. John and I were both taken by the possibilities here, and by the shared Mandevillian basis of what Smith and Gibbon were doing.
But it was the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century that was to be the site of our most ambitious collaborative venture; and it required the organising abilities of an energetic (John often thought far too energetic) young man called Stefan Collini to keep his older colleagues moving forward to the conclusion that became That Noble Science of Politics in 1983. With some justification, John liked to think of himself as an idler, a flaneur, a boulevardier even. He was under the erroneous impression that, having finished a big book of his own a couple of years before, he had earned a rest. That book was A Liberal Descent, his highly original, stylish, and prize-winning study of the leading mid-Victorian historians on the English past. Once he had been roused from idleness, however, and with some regular prodding, That Noble Science gave John an opportunity, among other things, to write on Walter Bagehot, another figure whose strength lay in exploiting the ironies created by the difference between appearance and reality.
John was the last person to shout about his status as a pioneer. Nor did he follow the example of his own mentor at Cambridge, Jack Plumb, in being assiduous in acquiring disciples. But John broke new ground in almost everything he wrote. Any brief he tackled was transformed into something nobody else could have done in quite that way.
It was not a case of leaving the best to last, but the works that John completed in the final decade of his life show just how much mature reflection had gone on alongside a life-time of curiosity-driven reading. His book on The Crisis of Reason published in 2000, a study of European scientific thinking and cultural and artistic movements from the 1848 revolutions to the outbreak of the First World War, represented the fulfilment of interests that probably had their origin in the A-level course he took in German in the mid-1950s. For his last major work, A History of Histories, he chose the largest of canvases to display his knowledge of the diverse ways in which historians have approached their task in the period that stretches from Herodotus and Thucydides to the twentieth century.
In a mixture of self-defence and self-interest, John used to joke that excellence as a historian was strongly correlated with being short and fat. As an example of what philosophers of science call an enumerative generalisation, this statement was true of two of his heroes, Gibbon and Macaulay, and one to whom he was greatly indebted, Jack Plumb. John wasn't always fat, but he was always an excellent natural historian who just got better and better.
In conclusion, from among the many tributes that have and will be paid to John, let me cite just one. It is by Julia Stapleton, one of our postgraduates who taught here before making her career in Durham. 'Reading John's autobiography', she wrote, 'is just sheer delight. The integration of his personal and professional history from day one is amazing. I am immensely grateful for the book, not least for the light it sheds on the history of intellectual history in Britain, something that clearly was in danger of not happening without John.' I'd now have to add that it is still in danger of not happening here at Sussex for reasons that John would have understood only too well.
The motto of Lady Margaret Beaufort, the woman who re-founded Christ's College, John's college in Cambridge, was 'Souvent me souvient' -- 'often I remember'. There is no risk of that not being true of John's friends. We shall be recalling and retailing stories about him and reading his books until it is our own time to go.