Professor Donald Russell's memorial service

TW The magazine of St John’s College, Oxford 2023 Nostalgia Parliament and the courts Digital library A curious Case Business complexity TW Contents 2023 From the Editor 1 From the President 3 College News 4 Research News 12 Parliament and the courts 14 Nostalgia in the long fourteenth century 16 Companies today: a complicated business 18 John Case: a curious specimen 20 Professor Donald Russell’s Memorial Service 22 Archbishop Laud’s secret ‘misfortunes’ 24 Library Phase III completion 26 St John’s Library Digitisation Project 28 St John’s almost Nobel laureate: Brebis Bleaney 32 Romance at St John’s 33 From outreach to application 34 Arts in St John’s 38 Oxford Open Doors 2023 44 Sustainability: front and centre at St John’s 46 Oxford North 48 Arrivals 50 Leavers 2023 58 The Reading List 59 Senior Members’ News 64 From the JCR 67 From the MCR 68 Sport Review 2022–23 70 In Memoriam 72 College Record 90 News of Alumni 102 22 Cover image by Hufton+Crow 70 Professor Donald Russell’s Memorial Service Dr Georgy Kantor, Tutorial Fellow in Ancient History, reports. n 14 April 2023, at the end of the Easter Vacation, a congregation of nearly 150 gathered in the University Church to celebrate the memory of Professor Donald Russell FBA (1920–2020), Official Fellow in Classics in 1948–88, in the service led by the College Chaplain, Elizabeth Macfarlane. Old members of the College, current Fellows and Classics students, and Donald Russell’s many colleagues in Oxford and throughout the world, were joined by some of his family members and old friends, and three Presidents of St John’s, Sir Michael Scholar, Maggie Snowling, and Sue Black. The memorial was followed by a reception in the Senior Common Room, and the Russell Society dinner in Hall, the largest gathering of St John’s classicists in a very long time. The tributes at the memorial included readings from Donald Russell’s translations of classical Greek authors, chosen to reflect on his own legacy and character, and of a remarkably accomplished poem he had written when still a student at King’s College School, Wimbledon, a superb performance of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata by O 22 TW 2023 Ben Cartlidge (a pupil of Donald Russell’s and lecturer in classical languages at St John’s in 2014–17), and eulogies from former colleagues and pupils. The speakers included Professor Chris Pelling FBA (one of Donald Russell’s first doctoral students and Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus at Oxford), Professor Michael Reeve FBA (Woodhouse JRF in Classics in 1965–66, and Kennedy Professor of Latin Emeritus at Cambridge), Dr Katharine Earnshaw (Supernumerary Teaching Fellow in Classics, 2010–16, and now Senior Lecturer of Classics at the University of Exeter), and Professor Patrick Finglass (1997, Literae Humaniores, and now Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol). Attendees also received a booklet with a collection of memories of Donald Russell that were assembled between 2020–23, while the memorial had to be delayed due to the pandemic. Many of those present at the memorial remarked on the incredibly consistent image of Donald Russell’s personality and achievement that emerged from the tributes: his profound love for his wife, Joy, his devotion to his pupils, his tolerance of our foibles, and his care for good style and good scholarship. Some of the key themes were perhaps best brought out in Katharine Earnshaw’s eulogy. The first theme was kindness, patience, and empathy, not as some optional extra, a distraction from intellectual achievement, but as a fundamental part of being an academic, the ‘ethics of care’ needed in scholarship and teaching, which ‘flattened perceived hierarchies’. The second was ‘gently provocative humour’. The third was ‘welcome homeliness’. Donald (in Katharine’s words), ‘offered a different perspective on the significance of the College as Domus, the importance of the familiar, the scaffolding thought of local relationships for nurturing intellectual curiosity. He demonstrated supportive affection, not affectation’. Across generations, the moral and intellectual example of Donald Russell influenced classicists – and not just classicists – at St John’s, wider Oxford and beyond. Patrick Finglass spoke of Donald’s arrival at St John’s, ‘together with other legendary tutors such as Howard Colvin and Keith Thomas’ being ‘part of a movement which transformed the intellectual status of our College’, and of his role in shaping the Literae Humaniores syllabus in Oxford, establishing ‘the very principle that Classics at Oxford must be reformed to be preserved’. Most appropriately, he quoted an ‘ancient Greek orator’ (St Paul addressing the Areopagus in Athens, a text included by Donald Russell in his own anthology of Greek prose), in his turn quoting the Hellenistic poet Aratus to his educated Athenian listeners: ‘As certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring (τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν).’ Reflecting on a lifetime of knowing Donald Russell, Chris Pelling summed it up: ‘I know of no-one with so marvellous a feeling for style; an expectation that authors would have something serious to say as well as to be concerned to say it elegantly; and an infectious feeling of the joy of a life of letters. He once wrote that Cicero and Plutarch shared ‘a serious, humane, unhysterical preoccupation with duty and morality’, and he was the same – and he enjoyed a good story too. He was an inspiration.’ Michael Reeve, who treated the audience to the picture of St John’s in Donald Russell’s much younger years, said ‘as a classical scholar... he never put a foot wrong, and none of us can have known a teacher or colleague either wiser or kinder’. In a speech he gave at the celebration of 65 years of his Fellowship, Donald Russell advised the College ‘to excel without ostentation and evolve without discord’. As celebration of Donald’s life, of Classics at St John’s, of scholarship and friendship, continued late into the evening, hopes were high that we shall continue to follow his precept. Across generations, the moral and intellectual example of Donald Russell influenced classicists – and not just classicists – at St John’s, wider Oxford and beyond. ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, OXFORD 23