My friend Tom Mason, who has died aged 74, was a senior lecturer in English at the University of Bristol and an author of books and essays on literature. He and I collaborated on two books, Selected Poems of Abraham Cowley (1994), and Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century (2022), and he also wrote chapters for multi-authored editions, including The Oxford History of Literary Translation, Vol 3 (2005) and John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays (2000).
Tom was born in Basel in Switzerland during a period when his father, Harold, an academic, was working there. His mother, Eva (nee Vest), was Swiss, and both parents eventually became teachers at Cambridge University; his father specialising in English literature and his mother in German. When the family moved to Britain shortly after the second world war, Tom was educated at Hele’s school in Exeter and the Perse school in Cambridge before going to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he obtained a first in English, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1976.
