birth_date: 1947-06-24 00:00:00
avg_rating: 3.82
name: Ian Ousby
about: I an Ousby's life began - and ended - in tragedy. The birth was tragic, or at least bleak, because his army officer father had been stabbed to death in the India of 1947, independence year, while his mother was pregnant with him. The death was tragic, or at least deeply sad, because his industry, insight, versatility, critical and literary skills, which had created a considerable reputation for him as a writer in diverse fields, have been cut off by cancer at the relatively early age of 54. Ousby never seemed a very contemporary figure and eschewed fashion and fashions of all kinds. Mannered and slightly languid - but not eccentric - in speech and dress, he was an essentially shy man who was able, through the clarity of his thought and the I an Ousby's life began - and ended - in tragedy. The birth was tragic, or at least bleak, because his army officer father had been stabbed to death in the India of 1947, independence year, while his mother was pregnant with him. The death was tragic, or at least deeply sad, because his industry, insight, versatility, critical and literary skills, which had created a considerable reputation for him as a writer in diverse fields, have been cut off by cancer at the relatively early age of 54. Ousby never seemed a very contemporary figure and eschewed fashion and fashions of all kinds. Mannered and slightly languid - but not eccentric - in speech and dress, he was an essentially shy man who was able, through the clarity of his thought and the manner of his expression, to get trenchantly to the heart of the matter, somewhat like a 19th-century essayist but without a hint of the dilettante. As writer, scholar and broadcaster, his contributions ranged through several genres: the study of detective fiction, travel, literature and modern French history among them. His readers were far flung: his book on the American novel was translated into Russian, on detectives in fiction into Japanese. Born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, he had a reputation as a rebel at school, Bishop's Stortford College. A young and liberal headmaster was not quite liberal enough for Ousby, and he fulminated in the school magazine, of which he was editor, against the public schools as "the last institutions in which changes in national attitude, thought or social pattern are reflected". An active member of CND from his early teens, he would go on the Easter marches, and proselytised in the provinces for the newly published Private Eye. Yet all this was misleading. Pitchforked into American student unrest at the end of the 1960s when he went to Harvard for his doctorate, he found the radicalism unpleasant and the time-wasting unacceptable. Writing from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1972, he observed: "Mercifully, political consciousness seems to have diminished, so they [the students] won't be going on strike all the time." The author of several books on early tourism and of Blue Guides to Literary Britain and Ireland (1985), England (1989) and Burgundy (1992), he had most recently been working on a major study, The Road to Verdun: France, Nationalism and the First World War, news of which has been greeted with excited anticipation in the world of books, and which will be published early next year. As a young man Ousby had quoted Martin Luther King approvingly: "You can never get rid of a problem as long as you hide the problem." In private life, like many or most of us, he probably failed to live up to that; in his writing, he triumphantly exemplified its message. Biography source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2001/a... ...more
death_date: 2001-08-06 00:00:00