From Sam Inglis
Katherine and I were graduate students together and shared a PhD supervisor. We became good friends and for five years or more we saw each other nearly every day, if not in departmental seminars and discussion groups then in the Champion Of The Thames pub, or the shared house on Akeman Street where she lived. Perhaps the current inhabitants still sit in that garden on summer nights, listening to frogs jumping in its many ponds.
Katherine’s star quality as a philosopher was always obvious. So too were her qualities as a human being. Rarely can so much talent and ambition have been wedded to such innate decency and modesty. She was naturally calm, composed, thoughtful and considered, and her rare unguarded moments and mischievous comments were all the more wonderful because they always took you by surprise. I remember being impressed by her spoken French; she told me the secret was to pretend to be Inspector Clouseau.
In 1999, Katherine came with us to my grandmother’s house in Devon to see the total eclipse. Of course, she charmed my grandmother and a house full of mad relatives. We climbed a hill and sat on the grass waiting for the clouds to part, but they never did. It didn’t matter.
Katherine was already bound to Scotland. I left academia and, perhaps inevitably, we were in touch less and less often. We visited a couple of times. (The first time, our train was hit by a falling cow.) She came to Cambridge occasionally to give papers, and to a dinner that would always seem too short. We last saw Katherine perhaps five years ago, and never heard that she had got ill. The news of her death is shocking.