Dead but not gone?

[sawyl]

From yesterday's obit of Peter Brunt, here are a few choice cuts. For example, on arguments:

He was often right and almost as often wrong, but had the disarming quality of forgetting between meetings what he had said at the last one, and just as dogmatically expounding the opposite view. The truth was that he preferred contradiction to agreement. At a meeting to discuss the introduction of archaeology into the Classics degree he pronounced: "In my opinion archaeology is a technique not a discipline," and sat back with a chuckle of glee as the room exploded around him.

As a raconteur:

Discussing the problem of staying awake in tutorials he said: "I woke from a deep sleep to hear myself saying, 'No that cannot be correct.' To my horror I discovered there was an undergraduate in the room. So I made him repeat the last two sentences of his essay, and in the second I detected an egregious error of fact." Once he invited a young graduate couple and their child to lunch; the mother was alarmed at her son's behaviour as she fed him under the table, but became even more alarmed when Brunt leaned over and said in a conversational tone: "You should have had an abortion." It was only later that she discovered he had actually said: "You should have had another portion."

On research:

He retired early, giving most of his books away on the grounds that there was nothing left to discover, and research was useless since he had exhausted the subject.

Sounds like he had a fun old time of it...