Robert Norman William Blake 1916–2003

Robert Norman William Blake (1916–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, had published admired revisionist studies of the soldier Lord Haig (1952) and the politician Andrew Bonar Law (1955), but unquestionably it was the brilliant success of his biography of Benjamin Disraeli in 1966 that stimulated support for his election to the Academy. He was born in the Manor House, Brundall, on the Yare, Norfolk, a little outside Norwich, on December 23, 1916 to William Joseph Blake and Norah Lindley. In 1935, Blake went to Magdalen College, Oxford, with a view to preparing for a legal career. He read ‘Modern Greats’, philosophy, politics, and economics. Blake was eloquent on the depressing peculiarities of World War II. He related in a manuscript fragment, ‘Memories of Christ Church’, that his two closest friends in the Senior Common Room were Hugh Trevor-Roper and Charles Stuart. In his biography of Disraeli, Blake made the British prime minister much less convincing as a heroic legend, but made him much more interesting as a man.