Geoffrey Thomas Leslie Ashe MBE FRSL (29 March 1923 – 30 January 2022) was a British cultural historian and lecturer, known for his focus on King Arthur.
Through his parents, he developed a life-long enjoyment of Gilbert & Sullivan's operas and Conan Doyles' Sherlock Holmes canon.
Ashe's father was general manager of Poly Tours, later Lunn-Poly, and travelled to Europe and the British Isles frequently with his parents to the hotels used by the agency, sometimes to correct problems, sometimes to establish business contacts.
His fresh idea was to scrutinise Arthur's foreign campaigns in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account and take the material seriously, concluding that, though the legendary Arthur is a composite figure, the career of Riothamus seems to underlie at least a major portion of Geoffrey's account, for which Ashe adduces passages in a Breton text and several chronicles.
"[2] Anya Seton put his name forward in 1963 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature[3] after publication of Land to the West: St Brendan's Voyage to America.