Calder, Angus 1942–2008

(Angus Lindsay Ritchie Calder)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born February 5, 1942, in Sutton, Surrey, England; died of lung cancer, June 5, 2008. Historian, educator, poet, critic, and author. Calder once told CA that he considered himself a humanist beyond politics or religion, affiliations that he believed could narrow a writer's objectivity and perspective. He strove for objectivity in his massive social history, The People's War: Britain, 1939-1945. The book holds the experiences and opinions of ordinary people throughout the British Isles as they endured the pain and fear of war. Calder gathered his data from far-flung sources—from personal diaries to official government documents and public newspaper articles—and presented people's honest and contrasting opinions, so far as he could, without his own editorial comment. The book was a huge success. Calder was credited with separating myth from history, without stripping heroism from the all-too-human figures who made it happen, though there were critics who felt he went too far. He followed this triumph with numerous historical and critical studies, notably Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (1981) and, more recently, Disasters and Heroes: On War, Memory, and Representation (2004). Calder spent his early years in England then expanded his horizon with teaching posts in Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and New Zealand. His great love was Scotland, where he settled in the early 1970s at the Open University in Edinburgh. From that base, Calder explored Scottish culture, studied the country's literary giants from Lord Byron to Hugh MacDiarmid, and set down his own thoughts in works like Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic (1994). Early in his career, Calder was awarded the prestigious Eric Gregory Award of the Society of Authors for his unpublished poems. After writing more than a dozen books and editing nearly a dozen more over three decades, Calder returned to poetry, with at least five published volumes, including Sun behind the Castle: Edinburgh Poems (2004). He also dabbled occasionally in whimsy, such as the material in Gods, Mongrels, and Demons: 101 Brief but Essential Lives (2003). Awards for Calder's scholarship included the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize (then of the Mail on Sunday) for The People's War and the book award of the Scottish Arts Council for Revolutionary Empire.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), June 16, 2008, p. 49.