In gratitude for the Elliotts' gift, Elly Elliott was declared by the trust Steward of Staffa for life.Born in 1921, Jock Elliott was the son of a wealthy New Yorker who suffered terribly in the crash of 1929. He told me that in 1940 out of the blue his father, John Elliott, had arranged a family meal as a celebration. When asked what was the occasion for the celebration he said: "Today I have finally paid off every creditor of my business in full who suffered in 1929." John Elliott Jnr displayed similar integrity.In 1942 he joined the marines. His wife was a considerable figure in her own right, having been Diary Secretary to John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State, and Social Secretary to Mrs Dulles. His supplementary academic pieces on classical and historical Orthodoxy - Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Byzantine and Russian - run into the hundreds.Meinardus had visited Egypt and travelled extensively in the Middle East almost every year since his retirement from Cairo University in 1968. His Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity (1999) celebrated the history of the second Christian millennium, surveying 20 centuries of Egyptian Christianity, Catholic, Evangelical and Orthodox:The vast numbers of their martyrs are a testimony to their unshaken faith.

During the Middle Ages, the Coptic Church kept the lamp of their faith burning amid trials and tribulations of all kinds.Perhaps his most popular publication is The Holy Family in Egypt (1986, originally published as In the Steps of the Holy Family from Bethlehem to Upper Egypt, 1963). It is immensely popular with tourists, providing them with a straightforward guide to the pilgrim sites in the Nile Valley. Patriarchen unter Nasser und Sadat ("The Patriarchs under Nasser and Sadat", 1998) and The Copts in Jerusalem (1960) remain standard works of reference. But the most popular academic text, still in print in English and Arabic, is Monks and Monasteries of the Egyptian Deserts (1961, revised 1989).Otto Meinardus served on the advisory board of the Egypt-based Religious News Service from the Arab World, renamed Arab West Report in 2003, since its inception over a decade ago, and had was exceptionally knowledgeable about Christian-Muslim politics. Just before his death he finished editing Christians in Egypt, which is to be published next spring.This distinguished scholar invariably concluded his academic works with some sharp and immediate comment. Coptic Saints and Pilgrimages (2002) concludes with Meinardian frankness:The Coptic Church has responded to the fact that hundreds of thousands of the faithful have left the banks of the Nile.

He arranged with the Chairman of the National Trust for Scotland, the Earl of Wemyss, to phone his beloved wife Elly on her birthday morning to tell her that her husband had given her the island - on the understanding that she would give it in a short time to the National Trust for Scotland. Four years earlier Jock Elliott, who looked like an archetypal Borders farmer (from which stock his ancestors came), had retired as chairman of Ogilvy & Mather International, only the second chairman after David Ogilvy. Secretly Jock Elliott had bought the magical island of Staffa, off Mull, famous for its Fingal's Cave and associated with the composer Felix Mendelssohn, in 1986. Never can there have been a 60th birthday present quite like it. John Elliott, advertising executive, collector and philanthropist: born New York 25 January 1921; copywriter, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn 1945-60; account executive, Ogilvy & Mather (US) 1960-65, chairman 1965- 75; chairman, Ogilvy & Mather International 1975-82 (emeritus); Chairman, American Association of Advertising Agencies 1974-75; married 1946 Eleanor Thomas; died Mount Kisco, New York 29 October 2005. In 1993 he co-authored a fundamental study of the manuscript tradition of the second-century Latin Platonist Apuleius (Uberlieferungsgeschichte der philosophischen Werke des Apuleius).

A Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, since 1981, he could often be seen working in the Bodleian Library, accompanied, after he married for the first time aged 89, by his wife, Ethel Groffier.A historian of philosophy who drew attention to the continuing influence of the Platonic tradition and to its transformation over the centuries, Raymond Klibansky also believed that philosophy could teach the timeless lesson of tolerance to the contemporary world.Jill Kraye. Klibansky's own edition of Locke's Latin "Letter on Toleration" was translated into several languages.With his colourful assortment of bow ties, Klibansky cut a dapper figure even in his nineties. Nor did advancing years cause him to give up philosophical and philological research. Having suffered persecution at the hands of the Nazis during his early life, in later years he founded and edited the series "Philosophy and World Community" (1957-95) whose aim was to publish and disseminate texts that presented a philosophical case for toleration. The building was spared, and the locals credited Klibansky with its salvation, greeting him as a hero on his return there after the armistice.When the war concluded, he was briefly Director of Studies at the Warburg Institute, before being appointed Frothingham Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at McGill University, Montreal, a post he held from 1946 to 1975.