On Friday afternoon, my father-in-law, Andor Gomme, died at home. This isn’t the place for proper reminiscences, but I wanted to post a brief note on one tiny part of what we have lost. Amongst all the other things that he was, you see, he was a quite remarkable academic, and he taught me more about what it means to be one than, I think, anyone else. I can’t imagine, though, that anyone will ever say of me what must certainly be said of him: No-one who met him could ever think the word ‘academic’ a synonym for ‘narrow’ again. With seriousness, with delight, with a vast store of carefully culled detail, and with spacious clarity, he wrote on Dickens, on D.H. Lawrence, on Jane Austen, on Shakespeare, and on literary criticism in general; he edited several Jacobean tragedies; he taught his way through the works of Doris Lessing and Paul Scott; he wrote standard works on the architecture of Glasgow and of Bristol, a masterwork on the architect Francis Smith, and (most recently) on the development of the English country house; he produced an edition of Bach’s St Mark passion – the list goes on and on. I’m not sure universities make people like him any more.
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