With his deep instinctive generosity of spirit, what he had to say would enrich and enlarge the working day

For about nine years, when I first taught theology in Cambridge, I was talking regularly with Nicholas, attending seminars with him, discussing work, new books, academic politics and all sorts of things, writes Rowan Williams.

For quite a lot of that time, we’d be speaking almost every day; when I moved from Cambridge in 1986, one of the things I missed most was Nicholas’s constant stimulus and encouragement, and the sheer joy of his company. Whether it was the careful and constructive demolition of a draft article I’d sent him to look at, or just a beautifully crafted and subversive anecdote, delivered with his great gift for mimicry, what he had to say would enrich and enlarge the working day. I can truthfully say that I have never had an academic colleague I so relied on for candid criticism, a colleague from whom I learned so much simply in the daily exchanges of the work we shared. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he was one of two or three people who made me whatever of a theologian I’ve managed to be.