Although elected as a Trustee at the meeting in 1969, R. C. Zaehner did not attend a meeting until 1971; his last meeting was in 1974, which he chaired and at which he reported that he could not proceed with an earlier suggestion to prepare a translation of Hujwiri's Kashf al-mahjub but agreed to write an introduction to the proposed new edition of Nicholson's text. However, since he died soon afterwards, after barely three years as a Trustee, his work for the Gibb Memorial was minimal, and so this essay focuses more on the very considerable impact that Zaehner had on the wider world, as a most private public figure and as an academic. Born on 8 April 1913 in Sevenoaks, Kent, to Swiss parents Maria Louisa and Edward Zaehner, Robert (‘Robin’) Charles Zaehner was a precocious child who enjoyed a privileged but conventional education and upbringing. Multi-lingual in English, French and German, he was educated at Tonbridge School, where a contemporary recalls,

He won a classical scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, taking a second in Honour Moderations (Literae Humaniores) and a first in Oriental Studies (Persian); research in Old and Middle Persian languages at Cambridge and Oxford followed; then there was a decade of war service in diplomacy in and around Iran, with a return to academia after World War II; subsequently, after another period in Iran, he took up the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics at All Souls College in 1952. Yet the title of ‘his most magisterial book’, Concordant Discord, might unconsciously have been describing his own contradictory personality as much as his subject. He had spent the 1930s learning Iranian and other ‘Oriental’ languages, conducting serious scholarly research in Old and Middle Iranian studies.