My friend, Elias Bredsdorff, is dead

http://www.slagelsebib.dk/forfatternet/billeder/eliasbredsdorff.jpgNice obituary in the Guardian by a mutual friend, Dorothy Wedderburn. Elias had an amazing life. He became famous as the definitive biographer of Hans Christian Andersen, but in a way that was the least interesting thing about him. He was in the Danish Resistance during the war and was the only man I knew who had known both Leon Trotsky and Bertrand Russell. My children loved him because he was tall and elegant and courteous in an old-world way, and they recognised immediately that he was, in some way, genuinely distinguished. To this day, every time we pass his College — Peterhouse — they sing out “Elias’s college!”