I first met Geoffrey Carnall, who was to be my supervisor for the four years of study for my PhD, in his small office at Edinburgh University in 1980. I was an energetic Marxist-feminist student, a former journalist, with cropped hair in staunchly corduroy dungarees, and he was a quiet thoughtful man with studious horn rimmed glasses and an endearing habit of saying ‘aha’ in reply to most comments, which – as I learned – gave him time to pause for thought.

Of all the things I learned from him, that pausing for thought was perhaps the most valuable. Not that I have ever achieved it in my own life! I am by temperament impulsive; but his passions: for scholarship, for peace, for social justice, run deep and slow. The ‘aha’ was more than the acknowledgement of someone truly listening: it was also a chance to think about the reply.

He taught me so many other things too. A rigorous and fierce regard for the detail of writing history: from punctuation (this is the man who taught me the use of the semi-colon which has enriched my writing and clarified my thinking) to the correct form of a footnote. My first version of my painfully wrought thesis was rewritten word for word after his insistence on accuracy in the text. For a mild-mannered man committed to peace he has a fierce adherence to precise thinking and precise expression.