Like most of our academic biographies, Vincent Gillespie's is pretty spare, were one to ignore his academic achievements. The ‘just the facts, ma’am’ summary would run: Born in Liverpool, 11 February 1954. Product of local Catholic schools. Came up to Keble in 1972. Attained a First Class degree, remained as a graduate research student. In midst of D.Phil. research, exiled for seasoning as Lecturer at Reading in 1977. Married the long-suffering Peg (exposed to his atrocious puns on a daily basis); two fine boys, now in their thirties. Returned as CUF Lecturer (one of Oxford's permanent combined posts, shared between college and university) at St Anne's College in 1980, an appointment succeeded by the then usual slow advancement through a Readership to a Professorship in 2004. Elected Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature (and Professorial Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall), thus nominal leader of English faculty medievalists, in the same year. Among subsequent honours, elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2013. Now obviously enough, at the golden age of sixty-five, presented this birthday gift.

Of course, English dons are given to the telling nuance, and a good deal, both edifying and amusing, lurks beneath the surface of these bare bones. Vincent's career has been indelibly marked by his two undergraduate tutors, the late Stephen Wall and Malcolm Parkes. Indeed, recognisably Parkesian inflections still leopard-spot Vincent's conversation (e.g. ‘Hello, sunshine’, ‘the bleeding obvious’). Between them, Wall and Parkes instilled a rare combination of tenacious textual attentiveness (Wall was a founding and long-time editor of the explication-given Essays in Criticism) with linguistic rigour and scrutiny of the manuscript record. As occurred frequently in those days, at the end of this instructional bath, Vincent was recalled to Oxford for a B.A. viva to confirm his First; an irritating interruption of summer job and potentially terrifying experience ended in his examiners, the rival philologists Eric Dobson and Norman Davis, sniping at one another, rather than at the abashed (and relieved) candidate.

While 1970s Keble was well on its way to shedding its traditional ‘rowers and ruggers’ (and buckets of Thirds) image, it remained something other than a bastion of unrelieved intellectual endeavour. Among Vincent's closest confrères down the years is David Owen Norris (who has managed to convert being College Organ Scholar into a career).