Stephen Medcalf

Stephen Ellis Medcalf (15 November 1936 – 17 September 2007) was a reader in English in the School of European Studies, University of Sussex, from its inception in 1963 to retirement in 2005. An academic and scholar of classics and European literature, he once alerted authorities to an abandoned newborn baby in a telephone box. Medcalf was a student of Iris Murdoch, friend of Anthony Nuttall, colleague of Gabriel Josipovici and teacher of novelist Ian McEwan. Obituaries appeared in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, and Church Times.

Biography Stephen Medcalf was born on 15 November 1936 in Romford, Essex, the youngest of four children. His father was an English and French master at Hackney Downs School Medcalf was later educated at Chigwell School before going to Merton College, Oxford to study classics. The Later Middle Ages (1981) Poems for All Purposes: Selected Poems of G.K. Chesterton (1994) A Light in the Darkness (2003) The Spirit of England - Selected Essays of Stephen Medcalf (2010) (posthumously published collection)