"Sir Peter Russell, who has died aged 92, was the most influential 20th century English-speaking scholar of Iberian letters. As King Alfonso XIII professor of Spanish and director of Portuguese studies at Oxford for nearly three decades, in his published work he time and again challenged received wisdom, while using an intimate knowledge of his university and a worldwide network of friendships to promote the study of Spanish and Portuguese literature and history. Russell was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, coming to England as a boy with his mother and younger brother, Hugh, the epidemiologist who died earlier this year. The voyage took them via the Panama Canal and involved running the gauntlet of the German navy, kindling in the brothers a taste for travel and adventure. Educated at Cheltenham College and Queen's College, Oxford, Russell graduated in 1935 and began research on the intervention of the Black Prince in Spain and Portugal. The result, a magisterial survey of Western Europe in the late 14th century, was not published until 1955, but two shorter studies that sprang from it established what was to become a pattern: primary historical research informed literary criticism, while the historical perspective took account of literary recourses and how original documents were produced. Russell's travels in Europe in the 1930s had alerted him to the dangers of fascism. Recruited into the secret services in mid-decade, he monitored developments in Spain before the civil war of 1936-39, and in 1940 was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps. His first assignment was to shepherd the Duke and Duchess of Windsor from Madrid to Estoril in Portugal en route to the Bahamas, and ensure they were not waylaid by German agents. He later saw distinguished service in the Caribbean, West Africa and the Far East. Russell had been made college lecturer at St John's, Oxford, in 1937 and at Queen's the following year. After demobilisation in 1946, he was appointed university lecturer and fellow of Queen's. The story goes that, when his Spanish teacher William Entwistle died in 1952, the then vice-chancellor, Sir Maurice Bowra, dismayed by the field, pleaded with Russell to put his name forward at the eleventh hour. He did so, and was elected. To some it seemed a puzzling choice: Russell was still in his thirties and, thanks to his war service, had published little. It proved an inspired appointment. Advertisement In 1951 Russell astounded an audience by demonstrating that the Cantar de Mio Cid was not, as believed, the work of an early 12th century minstrel, but of a learned poet writing a century later. It was decades before his conclusions were generally accepted, especially in Spain, but the evidence he had amassed was incontrovertible and the significance of his arguments would be marked a half-century later by a volume published to celebrate the author's 90th year. Russell's 1960 lecture on the personality cult of the Portuguese soldier-prince Henry (1396-1460) met with similar hostility, yet few would now question its conclusions, expanded in his last full-length study, Prince Henry "the Navigator": A life (2000). Work on other Spanish masterpieces, among them Don Quixote and the late 15th-century work Celestina, of which he produced an edition (1991), also changed minds and laid down lines for research. His literary essays were collected in 1978 as Temas de la Celestina y otros estudios (del Cid al Quijote) and his historical studies in 1995 under the title Portugal, Spain, and the African Atlantic. Russell was also responsible for the best single-volume primer on Spanish letters, Spain: A Companion to Spanish Studies (1973), and much else besides. For several years after retirement in 1981, he lectured at US universities. Russell's working assumption that intelligent young scholars, properly supported and motivated, might be relied upon to get on with their research for themselves, was vindicated time an

Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University. After degrees at Cambridge and Yale, he taught at the University of Sussex before moving to a post in the Faculty of English at Cambridge in 1986. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, and other periodicals, and an occasional broadcaster. His research includes the relation between literature and intellectual history from the early 20th century to the present. Current research focusses on the cultural role of, and the historical assumptions expressed in, literary criticism in Britain from c.1920 to c.1970. Recent work has dealt with the question of intellectuals in 20th-century Britain, the relation between academic critics and 'men of letters', the role of cultural criticism, as well as individual essays on figures such as T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart. Also work on the history, and public debates about the role, of universities in Britain.

In the Western classical tradition, Homer (Greek: Ὅμηρος) is considered the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of ancient Greek epic poets. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature. When he lived is unknown. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BCE, while other ancient sources claim that he lived much nearer to the supposed time of the Trojan War, in the early 12th century BCE. Most modern researchers place Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BCE. The formative influence of the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of Greece. Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds.

Lord Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He is the author of the The World After Communism (1995) (American edition called The Road from Serfdom). He was made a life peer in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. He is chairman of the Govenors of Brighton College Robert Skidelsky was born on 25 April 1939 in Harbin, Manchuria. His parents were British subjects, but of Russian ancestry. His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, he and his parents were interned first in Manchuria then Japan, but released in exchange for Japanese internees in England. From 1953 to 1958, he was a boarder at Brighton College (of which he is now chairman of the board of governors). He went on to read history at Jesus College, Oxford, and from 1961 to 1969, he was successively research student, senior student, and research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1967, he published his first book, Politicians and the Slump, Labour Government of 1929-31, based on his D.Phil dissertation. The book explores the ways in which British politicians handled the Great Depression. During a two year research fellowship at the British Academy, he began work in his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley (published in 1975) and published English Progressive Schools (1969). In 1970, he became an Associate Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University. But the controversy surrounding the publication of his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley - in which he was felt to have let Mosley off too lightly - led John Hopkins University to refuse him tenure. Oxford University also proved unwilling to give him a permanent post. In 1978, he was appointed Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick, where he has since remained, though joining the Economics Department as Professor Political Economy in 1990. He is currently Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. The first volume of his biography of John Maynard Keynes, Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, was published in 1983. The second volume, The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 (1992) won the Wolfson Prize for History. The third volume, Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (2000) won the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Arthur Ross Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. Since 2003, he has been a non-executive director of the mutual fund manager, Janus Capital and Rusnano Capital; from 2008-10 he sat on the board of Sistema JSC. He is a director of the Moscow School of Political Studies and was the founder and executive secretary of the UK/Russia Round Table. Since 2002, he has been chairman of the Centre for Global Studies. In 2010, he joined the Advisory Board of the Institute of New Economic Thinking. He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, "Against the Current", which is syndicated in newspapers all over the world. His account of the current economic crisis, Keynes: The Return of the Master, was published by Penguin Allen Lane in September 2009. A short history of twentieth-century Britain was published by Random House in the volume A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark in January 2010. He is now in the process of writing How Much is Enough? The Economics of the Good Life jointly with his son Edward Skidelsky.

Judith Shklar was born as Judita Nisse in Riga, Latvia to Jewish parents. Because of persecution during World War II, her family fled Europe over Japan to the US and finally to Canada in 1941, when she was thirteen. She began her studies at McGill University at the age of 16, receiving bachelor of art and master of art degrees in 1949 and 1950, respectively. She later recalled that the entrance rules to McGill at the time required 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. She received her PhD degree from Harvard University in 1955. Her mentor was the famous political theorist Carl Joachim Friedrich, who, she later recalled, only ever offered her one compliment: "Well, this isn't the usual thesis, but then I did not expect it to be." Eventually she became his successor. Shklar joined the Harvard faculty in 1956, becoming the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's Government Department in 1971. During her first year in the job, the Department permitted her to stay at home with her first child while writing her first book. When it came time for her tenure decision, the Department dithered, so Shklar proposed a half-time appointment with effective tenure and the title of lecturer, partly because she had three children by then. In 1980, she was appointed to be the John Cowles Professor of Government. Her friend and colleague Stanley Hoffmann once remarked, “she was by far the biggest star of the department.” Hoffmann also called her "the most devastatingly intelligent person I ever knew here." During her career, Shklar served in various academic and professional capacities. For example, she was active in the committee that integrated the American Repertory Theater into the Harvard community. Throughout her life, Judith Shklar was known as "Dita." She and her husband, Gerald Shklar, had three children, David, Michael, and Ruth