‘Do they eat people here much still?’
‘Rarement. Très Rarement.’ 
R.W. Johnson
- Thomas Hodgkin: Letters from Africa, 1947-56 edited by Elizabeth Hodgkin and Michael Wolfers
At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution. ‘God was dead all right when you wrote that speech,’ I said to Hill afterwards. ‘God died in the middle of the 17th century,’ he solemnly replied. The part of the address I remember best was Hill’s description of Hodgkin – like Hill a sophisticated Marxist – returning to Balliol in the 1960s and becoming the much-loved friend of even the most conservative fellows. ‘He showed a tolerance not just for the more right-wing fellows but even for the outright reactionaries which I, for one,’ Hill observed, ‘found deeply shocking.’ Hodgkin was endowed with an almost unlimited gift for friendship and had a sweetness of disposition and a sense of humour which almost no one could resist.
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R.W. Johnson, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.
Other articles by this contributor:
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
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