Obituary: Eric Christiansen

Over the past year, we have lost two names cherished by Spectator readers. Rodney Milnes, our opera critic for 20 years before he moved to the Times, as well as editing the monthly magazine Opera, died last December, and Eric Christiansen, the Oxford medieval historian, who was a regular book reviewer here for many years, followed on the last day of October. They both died at 79, both of cancer. Their upbringing and education were similar — Rugby and Christ Church for Milnes, Charterhouse and New College for Christiansen.From the last peacetime ‘call-up’ generation, both served unenthusiastically and unheroically in the army. They were both old and dear friends of mine.

Although I was sad that Rodney’s death wasn’t marked in these pages, I’ve written about him at some length for Opera, and so here I want to remember Eric. In the autumn of 1965 he had just returned to New College as a Fellow, and I had just gone up to the college, where Eric became a friend before he taught me, or tried to, about the Middle Ages, to which he had also returned, after a dissertation on the politics of the 19th-century Spanish army.