Obituary: Sir Peter E. L. Russell. Died 22 June 2006

The death of Sir Peter Russell, who died on June 22 of this year aged 92, is a great loss to the world of Iberian letters and late medieval history in the United Kingdom. As King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish and Director of Portuguese Studies at Oxford University for nearly three decades, his name stood alongside the most illustrious in his chosen fields of research. The author of several monographs, Russell was perhaps best known as an essayist, where he unleashed extremely incisive and controversial opinions on questions he had studied from close quarters. It was only at the end of his life that arguably his greatest work, a 448 page biography of Prince Henry the Navigator, came to be published.