44 1GM Monday June 29 2020 | the times
Register
Hugh Mellor at a Tudor-themed party last year with his colleague Daisy DixonWhat is truth? It is one of the questions
that ran through Hugh Mellor’s work
and sometimes spilt into the public
arena. Others were about the nature of
probability, time and tense. “Something
that starts off being in the future
becomes present, then it becomes past,”
he told the Philosophy Bites podcast,
pointing out that while time moves
only in one direction, something such
as temperature can go from hot to cold
and then back to hot again.
Former students remembered
Mellor’s inspiring undergraduate lec-
tures, adding that he was tireless, tough
and energetic as a postgraduate super-
visor, and a formidable opponent at the
Moral Sciences Club. “We coined the
Philosophers’ Lexicon-style definition:
hughmellorate (verb, transitive) — to
show a visiting speaker that their paper
is completely worthless,” his colleague
Tim Crane wrote. Yet those whose
papers Mellor ripped to shreds would
receive an invitation to lunch, explain-
ing that had their presentation been
stupid, uninteresting or unimportant
he would have remained silent.
Mellor came to wider attention in
1992 when he led a campaign among
Cambridge academics to block an
honorary degree for Jacques Derrida,
the French philosopher best known for
his theory of “deconstruction”. When
Derrida’s name was read out at a formal
university assembly Mellor and a small
group cried “non placet” (it does not
please). A stunned silence followed.
The matter went to a formal ballot and
the degree was duly conferred,
although Mellor remained adamant
that it was undeserved, adding: “He is a
mediocre, unoriginal philosopher — he
is not even interestingly bad.”
was what really led, in the end, to my
becoming a philosopher.”
Back in Britain he became a chemical
engineer with ICI. Although he
enjoyed himself, “they weren’t going to
pay me to do philosophy”. In 1963 he
“took a chance and came back as a
research student to Cambridge”. Five
years later he completed his PhD thesis,
The Matter of Chance, with Mary Hesse,
by which time he was a lecturer in the
faculty of philosophy. He was appoint-
ed professor in 1986 and after his retire-
ment in 1999 served for two years as
pro-vice-chancellor for research.
He remained a Cambridge figure,
drawing inspiration from the tradition
of Bertrand Russell, Frank Ramsey and
Richard Braithwaite, although he
distanced himself from the mid-20th-century enthusiasm for the later work
of Wittgenstein. His metaphysical
views fitted into an overall system that
he took pains to defend, but he was by
no means doctrinaire. When
colleagues pointed to a problem with
his system, he would tend to resist
initially; but not infrequently those
colleagues would be amused to note
later that his views had been adjusted.
In his mature work he was more a
metaphysician than a philosopher of
science, being concerned with the fun-
damental nature of reality itself rather
than the messy business of how science
finds out about it. His three major
books (The Matter of Chance, 1971;
Real Time, 1981, and its sequel Real Time
II, 1998; and The Facts of Causation,
1995) were on interlinked topics andin each case he adopted a firmly
objectivist stance.
One colleague told how at the age of
70 Mellor resigned his fellowship of the
British Academy, claiming that he was
“too old and out of date” to be making
decisions about fellowships and grants,
but then caused a stir by writing to
other fellows of similar vintage suggest-
ing that they do the same. Another
recalled that Mellor arranged for his
university pension to be reduced
because it was more than he needed.
Mellor, who was single, had a big col-
lection of friends. If his spiky character
meant that he was prone to falling out
with them, his warm heart meant that
he could make up with them just as
quickly. The theatre was his big passion.
He organised trips to the West End and
would tread the boards in Cambridge,
where his feisty and intense persona
came across vividly on stage, not least
as a persuasive Ulysses in a 1990 pro-
duction of Troilus and Cressida at the
Cambridge Arts Theatre.
It was an interest that spilt over into
his post-retirement academic work,
with a chapter in The Routledge Com-
panion to Shakespeare and Philosophy
(2018) in which he compared the art of
role-playing on stage with that of role-
playing in real life, such as the person
who occupies the role of, say, prime
minister or president. “It is in this sense
that presidents ‘have their exits and
their entrances’, as we all do in our vari-
ous roles — as friends, partners,
parents, neighbours, employees,
employers,” he wrote.Professor Hugh Mellor, philosopher, was
born on July 10, 1938. He died of
lymphoma on June 21, 2020, aged 81Square, London, and Cap d’Antibes in
the south of France and commuted
regularly from his base in Bahrain to
London and New York. His worth was
put at £130 million in this year’s Sunday
Times Rich List.
Having been educated in Iraq,
Turkey and the US, Kirdar was well
placed to sell the western and Middle
Eastern cultures to each other, chang-
ing attitudes on both sides. It took two
years to bring enough backers on to
Investcorp, because until then the Arab
custom was for a few wealthy individu-
als to agree a project and hire an expa-
triate manager to run it. They were
suspicious of signing up in their hun-
dreds and putting Kirdar in control. HeHe made the press again when Dar-
win College, of which he was a fellow,
decided to appoint a research fellow in
parapsychology, the study of psychic
phenomena. This, he complained,
would make the college a laughing
stock. In a neat piece of college politics
he was then drafted on to the selection
committee, where he was disarmed to
discover that one application, which
proved successful, was to investigate
not whether parapsychology was true,
but why anybody should believe it
might be true.
Crane wrote that Mellor tended to be
impatient with people who speculated
about the essence of philosophy, believ-ing this to be of as little interest as ques-
tions about the essence of science. “I’m
not interested in philosophy,” he would
say. “I’m interested in time, causation,
probability, the mind.”
David Hugh Mellor was born in 1938,
the only child of Sydney Mellor and his
wife Ethel (née Hughes). He was
educated at Manchester Grammar
School, studied chemical engineering
at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and
spent a year at the University of Minne-
sota, where he changed direction.
“I had to take a subsidiary subject and
discovered that Minnesota had an ex-
cellent philosophy department, run by
Herbert Feigl, who had been a member
of the Vienna Circle and was a friend of
[Albert] Einstein and [Karl] Popper,” he
recalled. “I took a course with him. That‘I’m interested in time,
causation, probability,
the mind,’ he once said
[email protected]Nemir Kirdar
Iraqi financier who founded Investcorp to channel oil money to the west and helped to draw up a constitution for his homeland
When Nemir Kirdar bit into a piece of
bread in his Baghdad jail cell, he tasted
paper. It was a note from his wife, Nada,
saying that friends were working to
release him. He had been arrested in
1969 in a mistaken attempt to force one
of his clients, the Texas-based
Continental Electronics, to fulfil its end
of a contract. It took ten days to estab-
lish that the Iraqi central bank had
simply not told the Ministry of Infor-
mation that it had received the necessa-
ry documents and all was well. Soon
afterwards Kirdar fled the country.
A decade later he had climbed high
enough up the ladder at Chase Man-
hattan Bank to fly in the private
Gulfstream II jet of the chairman David
Rockefeller (obituary, March 21, 2017)
for a tour of the Middle East. But Rocke-
feller would not back Kirdar's plan for
an investment bank to channel Arab oil
money into western companies, so in
1982 Kirdar broke away and formed
Investcorp with the backing of 336
Saudi princes, Gulf sheiks and other
wealthy individuals.
He was bulky, determined, and at
times bombastic. Over the next 33
years he poured billions of dollars into
more than 150 projects ranging from
the jeweller Tiffany & Co, the retailer
Saks Fifth Avenue and the Gucci fash-
ion house to Welcome Break motorway
service stations and Tyrells crisps.
Kirdar, a consummate networker,
befriended a galaxy of high-class
contacts including Henry Kissinger,
Colin Powell, Bill Clinton, George Bush
Sr, Margaret Thatcher and the Prince
of Wales, whose wedding to Camilla
Parker-Bowles he attended. He was a
founder of the annual World Economic
Forum in Davos, had houses in Eaton
faced an even bigger problem convin-
cing the British and American financial
establishments that Investcorp was for
real. “We were a nobody,” said Savio
Tung, one of several executives Kirdar
poached from Chase. “We had a bit of a
PR issue in terms of getting recognised
and getting people to appreciate that
we were a professional, serious invest-
ment firm.”
The quickest way to overcome that
prejudice was to land a high-profile
deal. The opportunity emerged in 1984
when Avon Products, the cosmetics
company, wanted to sell Tiffany. After
Kirdar outbid Donald Trump, then a
property dealer, he had a hard job
convincing Avon and its bankers that
he had the money — $135.5 million
(£103 million then) — and Investcorp
shareholders that the deal was not too
risky. “I left New York knowing I had an
instinct for deals,” he said. “But no bank
would touch it at first, and I would burn
with humiliation at that fact.”
Three years later Kirdar floated
Tiffany on the New York stock market,
making a $100 million profit. More
importantly, it marked out Investcorp
as a genuine player, opening the door to
more deals. Gucci was perhaps the most
challenging, because of rows among
the family. The senior figure was the
debt-ridden Maurizio Gucci, who was
shot dead on his ex-wife’s orders in 1995.
“There were some very hard times,”
said Kirdar. “We had some sour days.”
But when they floated the firm on the
stock market a few months after
Maurizio’s death, Investcorp returned
$2.1 billion to clients from a $246 mil-
lion stake.
Although Kirdar tried to run Invest-
corp as an orthodox investment bank,he could not completely escape the
Middle East fondness for blurring busi-
ness and politics. In the 1990s he met
Bush Sr and Kissinger to lobby for the
removal of Saddam Hussein and in
2003 he helped Condoleezza Rice, the
US national security adviser, to draft a
new constitution for the country.
In London Kirdar was a frequent visi-
tor to Downing Street and, through his
support for the London Philharmonic
Orchestra, befriended the Prince of
Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.
They holidayed on Kirdar’s yacht in the
south of France, and Charles
hosted an Investcorp dinner
in St James’s Palace. “That
was a spectacular night,”
Kirdar said.
Nemir Amin Kirdar
was born in 1936 in
Kirkuk, northern Iraq,
the third of five sons of
Amin and Nuzhet Kir-
dar. Nemir’s grandfather
succeeded in property
and his father became a
lawyer and civil servant. They
both represented Kirkuk in the Iraqi
parliament. Nuzhet would visit Queen
Aliya, mother of King Faisal II, at the
royal palace in Baghdad. Namir played
with the king, who was just a year older
and had ascended the throne aged four.
Despite their Muslim upbringing, the
five brothers were sent to a Jesuit high
school in Baghdad. Kirdar then studied
engineering at Robert College, an
American school in Istanbul. While he
was there Faisal was shot dead in a mili-
tary coup. Kirdar, his mother and two
brothers fled Iraq for Phoenix, Arizona,
where their cousins were living.
In 1961 another brother persuadedKirdar to return to Baghdad, where he
established a business as an import
agent. He met Nada at a family gather-
ing and they married in 1967. They had
two daughters: Rena has written two
books on the art of entertaining; Serra
is chairwoman of the advisory board of
the Middle East Centre at Oxford Uni-
versity and has written a book, Educa-
tion in the Arab World.
After his ten days in jail, Kirdar flew
to Lebanon with $800. He joined Chase
and obtained an MBA at Fordham Uni-
versity in the Bronx. Later he spon-
sored a Middle East centre at St
Antony’s College, Oxford,
chaired the advisory board
of the Center for Contem-
porary Arab Studies at
Georgetown University
in Washington DC, was
a director of Harvard’s
Institute for Social and
Economic Policy in the
Middle East and pub-
lished three books: Saving
Iraq, In Pursuit of Fulfilment
and Need, Respect, Trust.
Kirdar retired as chairman of
Investcorp in 2017 confident in the
belief that the bank would never be
short of work. “I really feel that the in-
dustry of acquisition of companies is
not going to slow down,” he said. “There
will always be some company which is
ready for a change of ownership.”Nemir Kirdar, investment banker, was
born on October 28, 1936. He died of
causes related to dementia on June 8,
2020, aged 83Nemir Kirdar, whose many contacts
included Margaret Thatcher, rightProfessor Hugh Mellor
Engineer-turned-philosopher who explored the meaning of truth and failed to block an honorary degree for Jacques Derrida
DR DAISY DIXON