Windsor’s Wisdom
| Author | Ken Booth |
| Published date | 01 December 2003 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117803174007 |
| Date | 01 December 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Reviews |
International Relations Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 17(4): 504–508
[0047–1178 (200312) 17:4; 504–508; 038397]
Windsor’s Wisdom
Ken Booth, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK
Philip Windsor (edited by Mats Berdal and Spyros Economides) Strategic
Thinking. An Introduction and Farewell (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers,
2002) pp.xi + 199.
Mats Berdal (editor) Studies in International Relations. Essays by Philip Windsor
(Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002) pp.vii + 246.
I first met Philip Windsor in the early 1970s. It was an encounter that so typified
this unique character whose death in 2000, at the age of 64, was a great loss to the
profession, as these two posthumous volumes remind us.
Following a talk in Aberystwyth, Philip bummed a lift off me – then a com-
plete stranger – because he had failed to make precise arrangements with the
people with whom he was planning to stay. They were old university friends of
his, and by chance lived in the same village as myself. In the course of the car
ride, Philip not only gave me some fascinating gossip about my village, but also
advised me to keep my eye on radical Islam. This was not only three decades
before 9/11, but also a couple of years before the oil shocks which made the
Middle East such a focus of geopolitical (but not politico-cultural) attention.
Philip Windsor had an incisive analytical mind, and one which could stand outside
the conventional and see things the rest of us could not.
The last occasion we met was in the mid-1990s, when I was External Examiner
at the LSE, where he worked for most of his life. In my final report to the depart-
ment, it was to Philip that I awarded an honorary Oscar for having been the
internal examiner whose comments on examination scripts and dissertations over
the previous few years had given me most pleasure, for their wit and insight. He
was on the ball whatever he did. This was pre-eminently the case in front of an
audience, for which he gained an outstanding and deserved reputation for public
speaking. He gave without doubt the best-ever lecture I have heard on nuclear
deterrence, for example, and I have heard many. After one such talk an American
graduate student asked me, ‘How is it that such a brilliant man as Mr Windsor
doesn’t have a PhD?’ Albeit without a PhD, Philip was brilliant and wise; he was
also, first and foremost, human: too human, perhaps, to flourish in today’s hyper-
professionalized grooves of academe.
Philip Windsor was born in 1935. He worked at the Institute of International
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