Adams, James, 1943-2021

J.N. (Jim) Adams CBE, FBA, FAHA was probably the greatest Latinist of his time, perhaps of any time. After a Research Fellowship in Cambridge, he held university posts in Manchester, for twenty-two years, in Reading, for two years, and in Oxford, for twelve years, and he was active in retirement until the end. For half a century he both opened up important new areas to linguistic study, and shed fresh light on familiar authors and texts. There is a breath-taking boldness to the questions that he took on and the comprehensiveness of his answers to them. His work has quite transformed our knowledge and understanding of Latin of all kinds, literary and not. It is no exaggeration to say that, through his research and publications, and by his example to the people he taught, supervised, encouraged, and inspired, he contributed to most of the work published – not only in English – on the Latin language and Latin linguistics in the last thirty years and now in progress.

Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 21