A toast to Tim Beardson

I am in an Eliot mood, not a Keatsian one. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ is a surprisingly… mellow poem. There must have been a brief ceasefire between poor Keats and the advancing forces of premature mortality. But I have just heard of the appallingly premature death — by today’s standards — of a fascinating fellow. So it is more a matter of ‘Under the brown fog of a winter dawn… I had not thought death had undone so many’.

At 69, Tim Beardson died of the ultimate effect of a tick bite, which compounds the sadness. At the beginning of the 1970s, he read history at the House. Although it was one of the few Tory redoubts in either university, the influence of Tariq Ali, Paul Foot and Christopher Hitchens cast a long shadow even there. Academe was also vulnerable because many dons’ intellectual honesty had undermined their self-confidence.