I have been thinking a little about the impact of the teachers I have known during my life. Two of them, the historian Roger Howell and the philosopher Jan Rogan, are probably the teachers for whom I have most respect and enduring admiration. I took a couple of early modern history courses with the late Roger Howell at St John’s College, Oxford in the early-1960s and recognised as soon as I met him how demanding a tutor he was going to be. My intellectual expectations were met. Sadly, I lost touch with him after he went back to Bowdoin College in Maine and only saw him once again in the North Library of the British Museum in c.1970. Jan Rogan was a philosophy teacher working near where I live on the east coast of England and had an unrivalled capacity for explaining difficult concepts to people of all ranges of ability. I did exchange a few e-mails with her in recent years before her death. I am grateful to have met both of them. There are or rather were other teachers whom I remember
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