He wouldn’t have had the slightest notion, but Anthony Kenny was one of two celebrated Oxford academics (the other being Sir Brian Fender) who influenced me greatly when he was chair of Oxford University’s negotiating committee for non-academic staff in the early 1980s. I’m reminded of what Aristotle said: “Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention”, and he certainly lived up to the ideal.
For a technician who left school at 17 to find himself negotiating with the master of Balliol was daunting, to say the least, but at all times Kenny was courteous, supportive and in no way patronising.
