THE TABLET’s legendary Paris correspondent Alain Woodrow died on 10 September.

Born in Hertfordshire in 1938 to an English father and a French mother he studied French and Russian at Oxford. He joined the Paris daily Le Monde in 1974; his first article for The Tablet was “Révolution à la Sorbonne”, which we ran in June 1968. He contributed regularly into the early 2000s.

“I inherited him from Tom Burns, who was himself so influenced by French Catholic spirituality and thought,” remembers John Wilkins, who edited The Tablet between 1982 and 2003. “He came from an Anglo-French family and had to decide whether to throw in his lot with the English side or the French side. So his choice of ‘Alain’ not ‘Alan’ as his Christian name was definitive. So was his adoption of a Breton beret. He looked French.”