Tim Hall

[first published on Tim’s blog Where Worlds Collide]

UK political and cultural blogger Norman Geras, of Normblog fame has passed away after a long illness.

I am very sad to announce that Norm died in Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge in the early hours of this morning. Writing this blog, and communicating with all his readers, has brought him an enormous amount of pleasure in the last ten years. I know that since writing here about his illness earlier in the year he received a lot of support from many of you, and that has meant a great deal to him, and to us, his family. The blog and all its archives will remain online.

I had the pleasure of meeting Norman Geras a couple of times at Blogmeets in Manchester a few years back, in the heyday of British blogging in the years before social media really took off and blogs went into decline. Unlike many, he kept his blog going rather than migrate to Facebook.

In an age where politics has become increasingly polarised, and some bloggers and pundits make it personal, Norm never forgot the humanity of his political oppoments, as this post on the death of Margaret Thatcher demonstrated.