Jovial, articulate and urbane, Anthony Quinton was, for many years, a highly versatile book reviewer for The Sunday Telegraph, served as chairman of the British Library for four years during the building of the new premises at St Pancras, and became widely known for his contribution to popular radio programmes, such as Round Britain Quiz on Radio 4.
Always to the point, amusing and free of jargon, he was once described as one of the very few academics "who would be considered for a directorship of an industrial company in the event of dismissals from universities".
Certainly he never allowed his zest for academic debate to overwhelm his relish for more earthly pleasures: in a diary entry for June 18 1984, the novelist Anthony Powell recorded: "Tony and Marcelle Quinton came to dinner... conversation began hammer-and-tongs. We drank Rosenthal's magnum of Pontet-Canet 70, which he had given us – good if not staggering."
Quinton's notably lucid books on philosophy and the history of philosophy include The Nature of Things (1973); The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (1978); Thoughts and Thinkers (1982); and Utilitarian Ethics (1973), a classic study acknowledged to be the most reliable introduction to its subject.
He also wrote acclaimed studies of thinkers such as Francis Bacon and David Hume, edited the anthology Political Philosophy (1967) and wrote From Wodehouse To Wittgenstein (1998), a collection of essays applying philosophy to political and social questions.
One of the most revealing – and uncharacteristically impassioned – essays in this collection dealt with the differences between Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy. Anglo-Saxons, Quinton argued, seek to arrive at knowledge which is objective and impersonal. Continental philosophy, on the other hand, is the "philosophy of the café: nobody speaks under oath or expects to be held responsible for what he says; everyone, to secure attention, speaks at the top of his voice and exaggerates." Such pundits, Quinton suggested, cannot be taken as wise because of the "villainous ugliness" of the jargon they use.
Quinton's own political outlook was Conservative and pragmatic, and during the 1970s and 1980s he was one of several academics who helped to shape the philosophy of the party under Margaret Thatcher. Quinton wrote an article in which he argued that the difference between Conservatism and other political philosophies lay in the extent to which Conservatives believe that the alleviation of hardship should be pursued by political means.
Conservatives, he suggested, oppose the treatment of political issues that go beyond the preservation of public order and the defence of the nation as issues of morality rather than collective expediency. The private individual can pursue purity of heart, but the political agent acting on behalf of others must take responsibility for the consequences of his actions.
Quinton bore a passing physical resemblance to John Julius Norwich, the flamboyant historian, for whom he was sometimes mistaken. In a letter to the "Dear Mary" column in The Spectator he complained that "People sometimes come up to me and say, 'Oh, hello, John Julius, I haven't seen you for ages'."
"I have on occasion gone along with it," he admitted. "On other occasions, I have not felt satisfied with the deceitfulness." (Dear Mary's advice was to "laugh good-naturedly, then reply: 'I no longer wish to be known as John Julius Norwich. I've changed my name by deed poll to Anthony Quinton'.")
Anthony Meredith Quinton, the son of a surgeon captain in the Royal Navy, was born on March 25 1925 and educated at Stowe. His own experience of the sea began traumatically in September 1940 when, aged 15, he and his mother were being evacuated to Canada in the City of Benares when she was caught without her destroyer escort and torpedoed in mid-Atlantic. They scrambled into a lifeboat which tipped up while being lowered and took in water.
For the next 20 hours, with only its buoyancy tanks keeping it afloat, the boat drifted in the freezing waters. As time wore on Anthony Quinton helped to tip into the sea the bodies of fellow passengers who had succumbed to exposure. By the time they were rescued by the British warship Hurricane, only eight of the 23 passengers on the lifeboat – including Quinton and his mother – were still alive. Altogether 77 British children and 217 adults drowned.
Apart from a short period of nightmares, Quinton claimed to have been psychologically unscarred by the experience: "I was a plump, healthy youth and I certainly wasn't hideously cold," he recalled. "I suppose I felt some sort of natural confidence that things would turn out all right." The people who had been most affected, he found, were those who had lost loved ones: "That was the lottery of it – whether you came out with the people you were close to." In the later years of the war, he served as a flying officer and navigator in the RAF.
Quinton went up as a scholar to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with a brilliant First in PPE, after which he became a Fellow of All Souls. In 1955 he was appointed fellow and tutor of New College.
It was an exciting time in philosophy, as Quinton later recalled in a review of Tom Stoppard's philosophical play Jumpers: "Philosophy was much more in the public eye then than it is today," he wrote. "The austerities and consequent boredom of the war and the years that directly followed it awoke an appetite for intellectual self-improvement from which philosophy, along with a lot of other things, benefited. There were philosophers about able and willing to catch the attention of a large public audience: Bertrand Russell and AJ Ayer and poor old 'Professor' Joad, who never reached that rank, but was at least lively and colourful. That has all rather petered out. The brightest young philosophers nowadays emigrate to the United States."
Quinton's impatience with solemnity, his delight in puncturing intellectual pomposity, and his sense that there is no intellectual problem so serious or terrible that it cannot be made the subject of a witty after-dinner speech (he was proud of the fact that his first book, The Nature of Things, contained no footnotes) made him much sought-after as a tutor.
One of his pupils was the future Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson, whom Quinton recalled as "extremely handsome in an Italian Renaissance kind of way – the sort of boy you would expect to find leaning against a column in a Bronzino painting".
Lawson's looks, though, were at odds with his "very steely, firm and concentrated character", and during tutorials Quinton had to be on his mettle: "Instead of the usual business of submitting the pupil to Socratic questioning, it was the other way round. He put me on the spot and I don't mind admitting it."
After becoming President of Trinity, Oxford, in 1978, succeeding AG Ogston, Quinton became increasingly involved in public affairs, serving during the 1980s as a member of the Arts Council, of the Peacock Committee on the financing of the BBC and as vice-president of the British Academy in 1985-86.
Appointed chairman of the board of the British Library in 1985, in succession to Lord Dainton, with the specific task of seeing the new library built, Quinton applied himself with enthusiasm, brushing aside criticism of the design.
When the Prince of Wales observed that the new building looked "nothing like a library", Quinton dismissed his remarks as "unreflective", pointing out that no building looks like a library from the outside.
A prodigious reader, Quinton had eclectic and catholic tastes in literature. Asked to name books he would be giving as Christmas presents in 1961, he included the Horizon Book of the Renaissance (edited by JH Plumb) for his mother, Updike's Rabbit Run for his wife and More and More Ant and Bee for his infant son.
He served, at various times, as a governor and chairman of the governors of Stowe School, as a delegate of the Oxford University Press, as curator of the University Theatre and as president of the Aristotelian Society, of the Society for Applied Philosophy, of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, of the Association of Independent Libraries and of the Friends of the Wellcome Trust.
He was a fellow of Winchester College from 1970 to 1985, was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1977 and created a life peer in 1982.
He married, in 1952, Marcelle Wegier, a sculptress; they had a son and a daughter.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaKaVrMBwu8Giq66Zop6ytHvCrqOtraKaerCuyK2smqqZmsBwrs6ooqxln5e2tcHAq6Ceq19shXWAmGlraISfp7FundSipa2nnmO1tbnL