Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsAppendicesAppendix XVIIdObituary ofG. B. Harrison Thelndependent Monday 25 th November 1991By Fred HunterGeorge Bagshawe Harrison, English literature scholar, born 14 July 1894,Reader in English Literature London University 1929-43, Head of EnglishDepartment and Professor of English Queen’s University Kingston Ontario 1943-49, Professor of English University of Michigan 1949-64 (Emeritus 1964-91),married 1919 Dorothy Barker (died 1986; one daughter, and three sons deceased),died Palmerston North New Zealand 1 November 1991.Few who studied Shakespeare between the 1940s and 1970s will be unaware ofthe name G.B. Harrison. As editor of the Penguin Shakespeare from 1937 to 1959(with only Hamlet in print till the late Seventies, selling 12,000 copies a year) the37 volumes were all his own work.Between 1923 and 1929 he had already edited 15 volumes in the BoNey HeadQuartos and 20 volumes in Harrap’s The New Reader’s Shakespeare (1939). Thecompanion volume, Introducing Shakespeare (1939), reached its eighteenth editionin 1985. His view is out of tune with modem scholarship: ’To me, criticism is"why I like/dislike this book"’. It is, and must be, a purely personal expression offeeling.’ There was no superstructure upon which to hang theories. His aim was toproduce texts approximating, as nearly as possible, to what the author originallywrote.For Harrison the earliest quarto, or folio itself, was the only possible text. So, for62 years, his quill pen, which features prominently on the dust-jacket of hisautobiography One Man in His Time (1985), was rarely out of his hand. But healso found time, while writing his book on Essex, in 1936, to contribute 90 secondsof script to Alexander Korda’s film Fire Over England, for which he was paid £30a week for three months, and, in 1937, he appeared on BBC television with theactress Irene Vanbrugh.Born in Hove in 1894, Harrison remembered seeing Queen Victoria in Londonin 1900, and his sense of history was nurtured early when he visited thebattlegrounds of Waterloo, aged about 10, in the company of the trumpeter whohad sounded the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. His years at BrightonCollege were not particularly happy, although he appreciated his Head of School,Miles Malleson, who later made a name in stage and film comedy. With theoutbreak of the First World War in 1914, he was commissioned in the Queen’sRoyal West Surrey Regiment, even though he was shortsighted and wore glasses.Posted to India, he twice saw active service in Mesopotamia, and was mentioned indispatches. After the war he returned to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where hehad spent a year studying classics in 1913, but changed to the new English Tripos,which he considered the future of humane studies for the professions. In 1920 hewas awarded first-class honours.He applied to Gabbitas and Thring (vulgarly known, so he told me, as Rabbit’sarse and String) and found himself teaching at Felsted School in Essex, at a salaryof pounds 300 a year. There he wrote his first book, Shakespeare: The Man and252MOD100051423