Alan Louis Charles Bullock: The historian Alan Bullock, Lord Bullock of Leafield, who has died aged 89, was one of the most versatile and engaging public figures produced by Britain in the second half of the 20th century.
"Bullock by name, and Bullock by nature," he liked to say of himself. He was a powerfully built man, and some people found him domineering. Others, especially those who worked with him to found St Catherine's College, Oxford, thought him little short of a hero.
Bullock caught the public's attention in 1952, with Hitler, A Study In Tyranny, which remains a standard work and an absorbing piece of historical writing. He went on to become, in 1960, founding master of St Catherine's, the only new college for both undergraduates and graduates built in Oxford in the 20th century.
People who worked with Bullock came away convinced that he loved committees. He enhanced his reputation by chairing high-profile inquiries into the teaching of English (1972-74) and industrial democracy (1976). Although, at times, he could seem wilful and overbearing, his closest friends and colleagues saw him as, at heart, a man of consensus. He was a popular chairman of the Tate gallery (1973-80) and other public bodies, and a favourite among journalists at the Observer, joining it as a trustee (1957-69) after the 1956 Suez operation, which both he and the paper opposed; from 1977 to 1981, he was a director of the paper.
He was Oxford's first full-time vice-chancellor (1969-73), serving during a time of student unrest. His build, strong voice and irrepressible Yorkshire accent gave him an air of strength that was quite undonnish. This served him well when keeping unruly students within limits.
Bullock was born in Wiltshire, the only child of parents who were in service near Bath, as a gardener and a maid; his father, Frank Bullock, was also a famous Unitarian preacher. The family soon moved to Bradford, where young Alan came under the influence of the city's well-known Liberalism. The Bullocks were poor but high-minded, and spent what money they could on buying books and going to concerts. Father and son were close; by the time Alan was 16, they were talking together in Latin.
He went on to Bradford grammar school, sharing a desk with a girl called Hilda Yates. The romantic, poetry-writing teenager fell in love with his neighbour and later married her. Lady Bullock - known to everyone as Nibby - was a supportive wife and possessed a mind as acute as her husband's.
Bullock won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, where he won a rare double first in classics (1936) and modern history (1938). Asthma disqualified him from military service and he spent the war at the BBC Overseas Service, where he learned, and enjoyed, the arts of black propaganda.
He returned to Oxford as a modern history fellow at New College (1945-52). He believed the university underrated his chosen speciality, but he contributed powerfully to its recognition when, using the abundant transcripts of the Nuremburg trials, he wrote his Hitler biography.
Almost 40 years later, Bullock returned to the subject with his thousand-page tome Hitler And Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991, revised 1998). His definition of evil was "the corruption of people to behave in an inhuman way". His Hitler is ready to destroy anyone and anything in pursuit of abstract ideas. Stalin, Bullock argued, frightens us both because he justified his bloody methods as the only way to modernise a backward society and because of his extreme paranoia.
Friends warned Bullock against attempting this double biography. Some doubted the two lives were, in any meaningful sense, parallel; a handful felt Stalin was beyond the grasp of this very English Englishman. His colleague Norman Stone said Bullock's Stalin came out "like a Sheffield city councillor running amuck, and beheading the aldermen".
This was unfair, for Bullock had grasped that Stalin's personal malice marked him out from Hitler, who was astonishingly tolerant of inadequate colleagues. Asked the frivolous question as to which of the dictators he would have preferred spending a weekend with, Bullock replied, "Hitler, because although it would have been boring in the extreme, you would have have had a greater certainty in coming back alive." The book was generally a critical success.
Bullock began work on another book in the 1950s, a three-volume biography (1960, 1967 and 1983) of Ernest Bevin, the postwar Labour foreign secretary. He also made a stir as a teacher of history who seemed in touch with the outside world, and won a reputation in the lecture halls equal to that other Oxford star AJP Taylor.
Also in the 1950s, he began the work of converting the moribund St Catherine's Society (designed for students too poor to join a proper university college) into a full-blown Oxford foundation.
Brandishing his novel idea of a college with as many scientists as students of the arts, Bullock almost singlehandedly persuaded companies to stump up the £2 million he needed and he caused horror among traditionalists by choosing the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen to put up the buildings on a fine riverside site.
He was made a life peer in 1976. In 1981, he joined the Social Democratic Party, and he continued giving lectures until 1997. His last books were a biography of his father, Building Jerusalem (2000), and a one-volume biography of Ernest Bevin (2002).
He was a singularly happy family man, and is survived by his wife, three sons and a daughter; another daughter predeceased him.
Alan Louis Charles Bullock: born December 13th, 1914; died February 2nd, 2004.