Michael Maclagan

Michael Maclagan CVO OStJ FSA FRHistS (14 April 1914 – 13 August 2003) was a British historian, antiquary and herald.

In 1946, Maclagan returned to Trinity College, where he remained as Fellow and Tutor in Modern History until his retirement in 1981.

For many years he shared teaching duties with the early modern scholar John Phillips Cooper (1920–1978).

Outside the University, he served as a university-appointed alderman on Oxford City Council, and held the offices of Sheriff in 1964–5, and Lord Mayor in 1970–71.

This appointment was made by the Chief of the Name and Arms of Hay after the resurgence of private armorial officers following World War II.

[8] Patric Dickinson, in the Independent, called him "the quintessential Oxford don – a scholar of the old school, erudite, antiquarian and stylish", who "seemed to have strayed from an earlier age".

[9] He had an eclectic range of historical interests spanning all periods (particularly, but far from exclusively, in the fields of genealogy, heraldry and bibliography); he was more concerned with arcane detail, for which he had a remarkable memory, than with grand narrative; and he tended to pursue topics and projects which appealed to him, rather than those which might advance his career.

He was a proficient linguist, fluent in Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and Serbo-Croat, and with some knowledge of Arabic.

For many years he spent part of his summer vacation as a popular lecturer on Swan Hellenic cruises in the eastern Mediterranean.

His mother, Helen Elizabeth Lascelles (10 October 1879 – 19 October 1942),[10] who married Eric Maclagan on 8 July 1913, was a granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Harewood: she was a sister of Sir Alan "Tommy" Lascelles, Private Secretary to King George VI and a second cousin once removed to the 7th Earl of Harewood who married Mary, Princess Royal, only daughter of King George V and sister to King George VI.