‘Do they eat people here much still?’
‘Rarement. Très Rarement.’

R.W. Johnson

Thomas Hodgkin: Letters from Africa, 1947-56 edited by Elizabeth Hodgkin and Michael Wolfers

At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution. ‘God was dead all right when you wrote that speech,’ I said to Hill afterwards. ‘God died in the middle of the 17th century,’ he solemnly replied. The part of the address I remember best was Hill’s description of Hodgkin – like Hill a sophisticated Marxist – returning to Balliol in the 1960s and becoming the much-loved friend of even the most conservative fellows. ‘He showed a tolerance not just for the more right-wing fellows but even for the outright reactionaries which I, for one,’ Hill observed, ‘found deeply shocking.’ Hodgkin was endowed with an almost unlimited gift for friendship and had a sweetness of disposition and a sense of humour which almost no one could resist.

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From the LRB letters page: [ 25 January 2001 ] Adam Thorpe [ 8 February 2001 ] R.W. Johnson, Liz Moloney [ 22 February 2001 ] J.S.F. Parker.

R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His new book, South Africa’s Brave New World, will be published by Penguin in the spring.

‘Do they eat people here much still?’‘Rarement. Très Rarement.’

R.W. Johnson

From the archive

‘Do they eat people here much still?’
‘Rarement. Très Rarement.’