John Lynch died in London on April 4, 2018, at the age of 91, after a long and outstanding career as a historian of Spain and the Spanish world. Born in 1927 in Boldon Colliery, a coal-mining village in northeast England, John came from a social and cultural background that was unusual for an academic historian of his generation. Most of his life was lived in London, with his wife Wendy and their five children, but he never lost his fondness for the northeast (retaining, too, a hint of its regional accent) or his commitment to the Roman Catholicism in which he was raised.
Lynch's interest in the Hispanic world grew out of his first encounter with Spanish history at the University of Edinburgh, where, after serving in the British army between 1945 and 1948, he took a four-year undergraduate MA. Then followed research for a PhD in history at...
