My friend Christopher Ligota, who has died aged 93, was one of the refugee intellectuals who had fled the Europe of the dictators in the 1940s. As a scholar-librarian at the Warburg Institute, which had itself been forced to flee Germany, he enriched the holdings of its library by using his profound learning to decide which books to buy. As a historian he made a major contribution to historiography, the history of how history is written.
Born Krzysztof Lilienthal in Warsaw, he was the only child of Mieczysław Lilienthal, an insurance executive, and Zofia (nee Sterling), whose father was the pulmonologist Seweryn Sterling. The family had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and changed their surname to Ligota after Christopher’s birth. When, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland, Mieczysław was called up, and Zofia and Christopher joined the streams of people fleeing Warsaw. In the winter of 1940 they crossed the snowy Tatra mountains into Hungary. Poorly shod, they fell behind their fellow refugees and were saved only by Zofia’s sense of direction.
They travelled to Palestine, and were reunited with Mieczysław, who served as a lieutenant in the Polish forces in the Middle East; he died in a road accident in 1942. After attending St George’s English secondary school in Jerusalem (1942-47), Christopher and his mother moved to Brussels, where her brother was living, and Christopher completed his education under the auspices of the British Council while working as a clerk for the Phoenix Assurance Company.
In 1949 he won a bursary to study history at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became the lifelong friend of my late husband, Richard Fyjis-Walker. Christopher remained at Cambridge for his doctorate, on medieval church history. In 1956 he was awarded a junior research fellowship at the Warburg Institute, part of the University of London, and was appointed to a post in the Warburg library the following year.
Christopher worked as a librarian at the Warburg until his retirement in 1993, and remained a constant presence there until a serious accident kept him housebound. He said that before cataloguing a book one should read it, and he read so voraciously that his flat in Ealing, west London, was fitted with rows of freestanding bookcases. His mother, who in London worked as an auxiliary nurse, shared the flat with him until her death in 1964, when her bedroom was given over to further book stacks.
He published just 13 articles, in English, French, German and Polish, but they distil vast reading and contain insights of great originality. After his retirement he organised a seminar at the Warburg on the history of scholarship, which put that subdiscipline on the academic map. A selection of the papers delivered at the seminar were published in History of Scholarship (2006), edited by Christopher and Jean-Louis Quantin.
Christopher was married in 1980 to the Polish novelist and translator Zofia Chądzyńska. Although she returned to Poland after a few years, they were never divorced and remained on friendly terms until her death in 2003.
