Michael Braddick's book on Christopher Hill

Mike Braddick's book arrived at my home yesterday. I read about two thirds of it yesterday and shall finish it this morning. Hill was my supervisor at Oxford when he was Master of Balliol. In personal terms we got on perfectly well and were always polite to one another. I did not, however, find him very helpful in an academic sense since he was completely unacquainted with manuscript sources of any kind and thus unable to guide me to the resources I needed to find for my research. I was also unsympathetic to his approach to the history of early modern England. This was odd since Balliol College was only a couple of hundred yards from the Bodleian Library which had and has one of the most magnificent collections of 17th-century documentary material anywhere in the U.K. It was not until I was at the Huntington Library in California in January, 1997 that I saw him again. His wife, Bridget, was already worried about his state of health which she thought had been affected by his work on drafting a new introduction to the Calendar of State Papers Venetian. Sadly, she too was unwell although he did not know it. He was unhappy about the personal attack he had recently received from a review by Mark Kishlansky. We had a number of conversations there in which he denounced the U.K.'s "bloody awful government" but, after that, only a handful of letters passed between us.