Donald Adamson, (30 March 1939 – 18 January 2024), was a British literary scholar and historian.
Adamson wrote books including Blaise Pascal: Mathematician, Physicist, and Thinker about God and Balzac and the Tradition of the European Novel, as well as The Curriers' Company: A Modern History. Adamson's works are regarded as a gateway to European literature.
Contents
Biography
Adamson was born at Culcheth in Lancashire to a farming family. His grandfather died when Adamson was two years old, so the family moved to the family farm overlooking the Bridgewater Canal in Lymm, Cheshire. His maternal uncle, and godfather, was Gerald Loxley. His father's family was of Scottish extraction, and a distant cousin was Thomas Adamson.
From 1949 to 1956 he attended Manchester Grammar School where he was taught by, amongst others, Eric James (later Lord James of Rusholme). He became a scholar of Magdalen College, Oxford, and was tutored by Austin Gill and Malcolm Pasley, graduating BA in 1959, proceeding MA in 1963. He won the Zaharoff Travelling Scholar Prize of the University of Oxford for 1959–60, thereafter studying at the Paris-Sorbonne University, being tutored by Pierre-Georges Castex. In 1962 he took the degree of BLitt, proceeding Master of Letters (MLitt); his thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil), entitled "Balzac and the Visual Arts", was supervised by Jean Seznec of All Souls College, Oxford.