Randolph Quirk

Charles Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk, CBE, FBA (born 12 July 1920) is a British linguist and life peer. He was the Quain Professor of English language and literature at University College London from 1968 to 1981. He currently sits as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.

Quirk was born at Lambfell, where his family farmed, in the parish of Michael on the Isle of Man, the son of Thomas and Amy Randolph Quirk. He attended Douglas High School for Boys on the island and then went to University College London (UCL) to read English (the department relocated to Aberystwyth due to the war) under A. H. Smith. His studies began in 1939 but were interrupted in 1940 by five years of service in Bomber Command of the RAF, where he rose to the rank of squadron leader. He became so deeply interested in explosives that he started an external degree in chemistry, but his English undergraduate studies were completed from 1945 to 1947 (with the department back in Bloomsbury) and was then invited to take up a research fellowship in Cambridge; however he took up a counter-offer of a junior lectureship at UCL, which he held until 1952. In this period he completed his MA on phonology and his PhD thesis on syntax, and in 1951 became a post-doctoral Commonwealth Fund fellow at Yale University and Michigan State University. Shortly after his return from the US in 1952, he moved to the University of Durham, becoming reader there in 1954, and professor in 1958. He returned to UCL as professor in 1960 and in 1968 succeeded Smith as Quain Professor, a post he held until 1981.

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