Notebook: A professor from my student days was a great influence on me
David Aaronovitch
[first published [£] in the Times]
On Friday morning I received an e-mail to say that Professor Norman Geras was dead. It is a peculiarity of the internet age that you can meet someone no more than a handful of times over a decade and still feel that you know and like them. So it was with Norm, as almost everyone—at his instigation—called him. I will miss him badly.
There will be an obituary for Norm in the paper, so I won’t try to duplicate what you will find there. I just want to explain, not least to myself, why he was important to me.