Richard Cobb had many good friends, among them Hugh Trevor-Roper, who kept letters, and so made this selection possible. There must be many more letters, since the author was an inveterate correspondent at least from the 1930s. The wartime ones would be of greater historical interest than these, which are nearly all post-1967, many of them concerned with the essentially piddling subjects of university politics, pupils and personalities. Of course, these are foie gras and the sound of trumpets to persons connected with such things at Oxford and Cambridge, but the admirable publisher must be aiming at a larger audience than that, ignoring Cobb’s own repeated assertion that ‘nothing ever happens’ in Oxford.
He was not your average don. ‘One of the most eccentric figures of the university world,’ according to his obituary in Le Monde, and that meant both Great Britain and France. He was a French-English Janus, fired up with Gallic and John Bull prejudice in equal amounts, and ready to defend both in either language, opinionated almost to the point of frenzy.
I knew him slightly: not well enough to enlist in any of his vendettas, but close enough to sense the attraction of his personality for pupils and some colleagues despite his spluttering, goggle-eyed indignation, his tendency to fall over, and his curious smell: tobacco and booze, entendu, but something additional, more rank, unexpected from a married Salopian, perhaps; but in no way detracting from his magnetism as a teacher.
He was small, noisy, usually eager for human contact, and although he would deny it, sometimes charming and nearly always kind in conversation, if not in his letters. His works in English left me weak at the knees with admiration, whether they concerned Restoration and Napoleonic France or Tunbridge Wells before the war, mainly because of his eye for the telling detail of everyday life which reveals the inadequacy of the generalisation.
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