T. H. Barrett has been publishing on China since 1972, and is now Professor Emeritus of East Asian History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Though he has mainly worked on the history of religion in East Asia, he has also long taken an interest in the development of the study of China in Britain, and has published on this topic also. Professor Barrett has been closely involved in organisations concerned with the furtherance of Chinese Studies, taking on, in the past, the chairmanship of the Universities’ China Committee in London and chairing the Asian Studies panels in two national Research Exercises. He has written for the London Review of Books, The Independent, and other publications, and contributed frequently to the radio programme ‘In Our Time’ and to other media.
James Barr was born in Glasgow and went to Edinburgh University. He was ordained as a Church of Scotland minister and served for two years in Tiberias, Israel. He published “The Semantics of Biblical Language” in 1961 and became professor of Semitic languages at Manchester in 1965. He moved to Oxford in 1976 and thence to Vanderbilt University, Nashville in 1989, publishing further books on theology.
Richard David Barnett, CBE, FBA was the Keeper, Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum.
He was born on 23 January 1909, the son of Lionel David Barnett, who was the Keeper of Oriental Books and Manuscripts at the British Museum from 1908 to 1936. He attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was a student of British School of Archaeology at Athens from 1930 to 1932.
In 1932, Barnett was appointed an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum. He remained in that office until 1939, when he moved to the Admiralty for war service; after spells there and at the Foreign Office, he served in the RAF from 1942 to 1946. On demobilisation, he returned to his post at the British Museum in 1946 and was promoted to Deputy Keeper in 1953.
In 1955, he became Keeper of the department, serving until 1974.[1] He then spent the 1974-75 year as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Barnett was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1962 and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974. He served as president of the Jewish Historical Society of England from 1959 to 1961 and chairman of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society between 1968 and 1986.
He died on 29 July 1986.