All scholars are a product of their times, and so too is their scholarship. However, good scholarly work can transcend time and place, and both a life and scholarly works can of course be appreciated outside their original context. Robert Bertram (‘Bob’) Serjeant's life spanned – give or take a year at each end – the ‘short twentieth century’ between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Soviet Union. Viewed now, from the brief distance of just short of three decades since his death in 1993 at the age of seventy-eight, his prolific academic work can be understood as having been shaped by this context – indeed as being inextricably bound to the history of the British Empire in this period – but also as having a lasting importance. Not only was Serjeant at the centre of British academic engagement with the history and culture of the Arabic-speaking world from the 1940s until the 1980s, but he was also an eyewitness participant in military and political crises in South Arabia in the 1940s and 1960s. These experiences, together with his fieldwork, contributed to his distinctive work on the history and culture of the Arab world, especially the laws, customs and traditions of South Arabia. His scholarship was unusual for the knowledge of both colloquial and classical Arabic that informed it and for reflecting his conviction about the importance of the study of traditional life in contemporary South Arabia, both in its own right and as a crucial source of insight into the Arabian and Islamic past.

Serjeant was born in Edinburgh on 23 March 1915, and he died at Denhead, St Andrew’s, on 29 April 1993. During the 1940s, he served with the Aden Government Guards in the Aden Protectorate, then in the BBC, and then he held a Colonial Research Fellowship that took him back to British-administered South Arabia. From 1948 he worked at SOAS and then, from 1964, at Cambridge before retiring, in 1981, from the Sir Thomas Adams's Chair in Arabic to Fife, from where he continued to research and publish right up to his death. He travelled widely and frequently. Notably, he returned to South Arabia for some lengthy stays during the revolutions and unrest of the 1960s, including his first visits to North Yemen.