Our paths first crossed around Easter 1960 when we sat the entrance exams for Oxford, although I have no particular memory of us actually meeting then. We had both applied to Trinity. There we were interviewed by the college's formidable modern history tutor, John Cooper, and a young don standing in for Michael Maclagan, Trinity's medieval history fellow, who was on sabbatical leave writing an account of his ancestor ‘Clemency’ Canning, viceroy of India at the time of the Mutiny. I'm not sure what happened in Malcolm's case, but in my own interview most of the running was made by the young don, while Cooper, slumped in his chair, surrounded by teetering piles of books on the floor that were still there years later, shuffled papers to the accompaniment of sundry snorts, whether of approval or disagreement I was then unable to say, though I later learnt that such eructations usually preceded an acute dissection of whatever banalities my weekly essay had offered. However, we both satisfied the examiners sufficiently on that occasion, as in October 1960 we came up as freshmen. Since then our careers have run in roughly parallel courses with many mutual interests, even to the extent that almost fifty years later we were still writing essays for that same young don, who was, as some must have guessed, Maurice Keen.

It soon became apparent as an undergraduate that Malcolm had not only been to a school, Brentwood, which had prepared him well for academic life in Oxford but that he brought a capacity for sustained endeavour to his studies that was unusual amongst most Trinity men of our generation.