The University is grateful to all those who have chosen to support the University by remembering us in their Wills. Taken together, the gifts left to us in 2022–2023 provide almost £600,000 of support across a range of areas of work at the University. We are deeply grateful to all those who have supported the University in this way.

Christopher Ligota
1929–2022

Christopher first came to the Warburg Institute in 1956 as a Junior Research Fellow, after an itinerant childhood and youth which led him as a refugee from his native Warsaw via Jerusalem and Brussels to study as an undergraduate and PhD student in medieval history at Trinity College Cambridge, with a year spent at the University of Göttingen. 

It was with the aim of furthering the work he had carried out for his 1956 Cambridge doctoral dissertation that he entered the competition for the two-year Warburg fellowship. Although Christopher resigned his fellowship after just one year in order to take up a position in the Library, where he worked from 1957 until his retirement in 1993, he never ceased to study history, as is clear from his publications, whose relatively small size belies its impressive intellectual range and depth. 

Christopher’s scholarship was largely built on the foundation of his day job as Assistant and then Associate Librarian (Academic). He spent most of his spare time reading the vast quantity of the books he ordered and catalogued for the Library. Walking past Woburn Square at night, one often saw a single illuminated window in the Institute, issuing from the desk lamp (never the overhead light) in Christopher’s narrow and cluttered ground-floor office; the only thing which changed after his retirement was that the late-night illumination moved to his equally cluttered office on the second floor.

Robert McIntosh
1951–2023 

Robert was a double alumnus of the University of London. His affiliation with the University started in 1984 when he enrolled for BA Modern History, Economic History and Politics at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College (now Royal Holloway, University of London) from which he graduated with first class honours in 1987. 

Robert grew up campaigning against apartheid and so having found a combined academic and personal passion, Robert moved on to his MSc at SOAS, with a focus on the politics of South Africa. 

Robert was a keen political campaigner and played an active role in local politics until the end of his life, having been elected as a Brighton and Hove city councillor for Rottingdean Coastal ward not long before his death. 

The Labour MP of Brighton Kemptown, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, said: “I lost a friend and Brighton Kemptown Labour lost a member of our family. An educator by profession, no one worked harder for the causes he believed in than Robert.” 

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