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My former colleague Osman Durrani, who has died aged 77, was a scholar of German literature and culture with a broad range of research interests. He wrote books on Goethe, Faust and the Bible (1977) and Faust: Icon of Modern Culture (2004), and another on fictions of Germany in the modern novel. He also edited an anthology of German Romantic poetry and had a collection of his poems, After Sunset, published in 1978.
There was more to Osman’s range than classical literature, though. He was a close observer of the contemporary literary scene, a friend of the novelist Joseph von Westphalen, and a key participant in the 1990s at conferences on post-unification German themes, one of which he organised himself at University College Durham in 1994, resulting in the publication The New Germany: Literature and Society after Unification, co-edited with Colin Good and Kevin Hilliard. To the end of his life he enjoyed reviewing books, for academic journals and the Times Literary Supplement, insisting that a review should never take more than a day to write.
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My mother, Brenda Almond, who has died aged 85, was a philosopher, author and ethicist.
She was born into a poor, working-class family in Birkenhead, Merseyside. Her father, Edward, a painter and decorator, was called up during the second world war and died soon after; her mother, Margaret (nee Potter), died of a respiratory illness when Brenda, an only child, was five.
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My friend and teacher Kenneth Fowler, who has died aged 88, was an eminent historian of the hundred years war, and a leading light in the teaching of history over more than three decades at Edinburgh University.
Ken’s parents, Ronald and Ethel (nee McMahon), lived next door to the large grocer’s shop they kept at Clayton-le-Woods in Lancashire, and sent Ken and his older brother, David, later a successful businessman, to the local primary school, from where Ken went on to boarding school in Derbyshire.
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