31 Facts About Maurice Cowling

In 1943 Maurice Cowling won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, but was called up for military service in September 1944, where he joined the Queen's Royal Regiment.

In 1946 Maurice Cowling was attached to the Kumaon Regiment and the next year-and-a-half he travelled to Agra, Razmak on the North-West Frontier and Assam.

Maurice Cowling later remembered that he fell in love with Cambridge.

Maurice Cowling toyed with the idea of being ordained and went to college chapel, possessing "a strong polemical Christianity".

In 1954 Maurice Cowling worked at the British Foreign Office for six months at the Jordan department, and in early 1955, The Times gave him the job of foreign leader-writer, which he held for three years.

In 1957 Maurice Cowling was invited by the Director of the Conservative Political Centre to write a pamphlet on the Suez Crisis; it was never published however, as the party wanted to move on from Suez as quickly as possible.

Maurice Cowling stood unsuccessfully for the parliamentary seat of Bassetlaw during the General Election of 1959 for the Conservative Party.

Maurice Cowling later said that "I enjoyed being a candidate, though it was very hard work and elections are like what I imagine having all your teeth out is like".

In 1961 Maurice Cowling was elected a fellow of Jesus College and Director of Studies in Economics, shortly before the History Faculty appointed him to an Assistant Lectureship.

Maurice Cowling argued that social science's claim to have discovered how people behaved was false because politics was too complex and fluid to be rationalised by theorists and only fully intelligible to politicians.

Dr Roland Hall reviewed the book in Philosophical Quarterly and called it "dangerous and unpleasant", with Maurice Cowling later remarking that this "was what it was intended to be".

In November 1966 Maurice Cowling was elected as a Conservative councillor on the Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely County Council in a by-election, which he held until 1970.

Maurice Cowling was appointed the literary editor of The Spectator from 1970 to 1971, and in the early 1970s he wrote articles of a broadly Powellite nature arguing against the UK being a member of the EEC.

Maurice Cowling resigned in 1971 when the editor acting in George Gale's absence refused to publish Maurice Cowling's protest against his publication of an article by Tony Palmer which suggested that the important question about Princess Anne was whether she was a virgin.

Maurice Cowling was "instrumental" in getting the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton, from Oxford to become Master of Peterhouse from 1980 to 1987, though in later years he came to regret supporting Trevor-Roper's arrival there.

Maurice Cowling did not find it normal that fellows should wear mourning on the anniversary of General Franco's death, attend parties in SS uniform or insult black and Jewish guests at high table.

In November 1989 Maurice Cowling published his essay on "The Sources of the New Right" in Encounter which detailed the ideological roots of Thatcherism in Britain and became the Preface to the second edition of Mill and Liberalism in 1990.

In Maurice Cowling's view "Liberalism is essentially the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there can't, it is a misleading way to approach politics".

In 1992 Philip Williamson published his book on British politics from 1926 to 1932 and said Maurice Cowling "provided the original inspiration" for it.

Maurice Cowling retired from the History Faculty of Cambridge in 1988, and from his Fellowship of Peterhouse in 1993.

In 1996, in Swansea, where he now lived, Maurice Cowling married George Gale's ex-wife Patricia, with whom he had long conducted an affair.

On 24 August 2005, Maurice Cowling died at Singleton Hospital in Swansea after a long illness.

Maurice Cowling wrote three books on British high politics, the sequence he called The Politics of British Democracy.

Maurice Cowling wrote that "In the future there will be an introduction bearing the sequence-title which will deal in its widest aspects with the period from 1850 to 1940 and will assess the methods used in the volumes which have now been published".

Maurice Cowling wrote a letter to The Times Literary Supplement on 3 June 1977 arguing for the need for "a different emphasis" to that on high politics.

Maurice Cowling challenged the traditional liberal assumptions over the reform crisis of the 1860s by arguing that the Liberal Party was not the straightforward progressive party that wanted to hand political power to the working-class and that the Conservatives did not promote reform in reaction to working-class pressure.

Maurice Cowling disapproved of the fact that the war was followed by a Labour electoral landslide, a greatly expanded welfare state and the liquidation of the British Empire.

The policy making process for Maurice Cowling is heavily influenced by party politics.

Maurice Cowling was well known for his Primat der Innenpolitik explanations for British foreign policy; for example, he argued that the British "guarantee" of Poland issued on 31 March 1939 was advanced to improve the Conservatives' chances against Labour, and had nothing to do with foreign policy considerations.

The political history books required "tiring archival visits"; Maurice Cowling much preferred writing these.

Maurice Cowling placed Christianity squarely at the centre of English culture post-1840 and claimed that anti-Christians more often than not held traditional religious assumptions and prejudices.