RIP: Maurice Cowling

Cowling argued that liberalism as a political creed was not about
freedom and choice, but about intolerance and priggery. He regarded it as his
life's work to subvert what he called the "rancid solemnities" of the post-war
liberal consensus and its intellectual antecedents.

His popularity [in Cambridge] owed much to his idiosyncratic and irreverent
style. He often conducted supervisions dressed in a green dressing-gown; about
favoured undergraduates he would say, "Ah, he's evil", and he was endlessly
indulgent of their youthful foibles.

Maurice Cowling
(Filed: 26/08/2005)

Maurice Cowling, the historian and Fellow of Peterhouse,
Cambridge, who died on Wednesday aged 78, was a leading political historian of
the England of the 19th and 20th centuries; he was also a scourge of liberalism,
and was often credited with being a major influence on Margaret Thatcher.

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