My former tutor John Bramble, who has died aged 78, was one of a group of Latinists who, between the late 1960s and 80s, used new critical approaches to rejuvenate the study of ancient Latin texts.
John was born in Salford to Clifton Bramble, a finance manager in the Manchester Corporation’s transport department, and Louisa (nee Murray), an administrator with the Co-operative wholesale society.
He was educated at Manchester grammar school and then at Cambridge University, where he gained a first-class classics degree and a first class in part of an English degree. He went on to do postgraduate work on the Roman poet Lucan’s savagely pessimistic epic on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey. In 1967 he was elected to a junior research fellowship at Peterhouse, and in 1970 he moved from Cambridge to Oxford to take up a fellowship in classics at Corpus Christi College.
With his friend Oliver Lyne, John introduced to Oxford excitingly fresh ways of thinking about Latin literature. In his unconventional tutorials, looking at a Latin poem might alternate with listening to Jimi Hendrix as a way of exploring how the latter’s reworking of The Star-Spangled Banner could cast light on Horace’s performance as an Augustan propagandist.
His published output, while not prolific, included valuable contributions on the Roman poets Catullus, Lucan, and Persius.
John’s other passions included motorbikes and gardening. As Corpus Christi’s garden master, he was instrumental in appointing as college gardener David Leake, who created one of the least conventional of college gardens, with towering bamboo and meandering marrows in the Corpus front quad.
In 1986 John took early retirement from Corpus on health grounds. He was to have many years of active retirement, creating fine gardens in the various homes in which he lived and pursuing his intellectual interests in a succession of different places, as restless in body as he was in mind. He developed an interest in the reception of oriental religion and mysticism in the modern world, and wrote a remarkable book titled Modernism and the Occult (2015).
Having a spiritual attachment to Tibetan Buddhism, he spent time on retreat at the Kagyu Samye Ling monastery at Eskdalemuir in Scotland. In his last home, in Totnes, Devon, he became a regular visitor to the town’s Golden Buddha Centre.
He is survived by his sister Christine.
