Paul Xuereb writes:
I first met Donald Sultana, my old professor, mentor and friend, in 1952 during my first year at the University of Malta, when he was engaged to teach English literature following the sudden death of an old professor.
Donald’s arrival marked the beginning of a welcome new phase in the teaching of English literature at our University. He was a young man who had acquired a medical degree from our university and put it aside to acquire a degree in English at St John’s, Oxford. His enthusiasm for his subject was contagious and found a ready response among a good number of us.
He fostered my interest in theatre and in drama criticism, and encouraged me and a few others to read for an honours degree in English concurrently with our law studies.
Above all, his organisation of a month-long trip to England for a small group of students gave me and others an illuminating view of English life and culture. From then on, English literature came to life in our minds, and watching great performers like Edith Evans and John Gielgud onstage stimulated my passion for the theatre even further.
Between the year when I stopped being his student and the year, decades later, when he retired from his Reader’s post at the University of Edinburgh, the university where he spent much of his academic life, Donald was busy writing a long series of fine scholarly books and articles, many of them about British 19th century authors who had some connection with Malta.
His doctoral dissertation at Oxford had been about Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy, a work subsequently published by Blackwell in Oxford. Of course, teaching all those years in Scotland led him almost inevitably to Sir Walter Scott, whose voyage to and stay in Malta not long before his death he described in great detail in two books.
During his long absence from Malta (an absence broken by long holidays here) he and I corresponded from time to time, and he was also pleased to ask me to review in this newspaper his books with a Malta connection – the Coleridge book, the Scott books, a lively account of Benjamin Disraeli’s visit to Malta, and a book on John Hookham Frere and his brother William.
When on holiday from Edinburgh, he gave a series of talks/recitals under the auspices of the British Culture Association, occasions when the lecture room inevitably overflowed.
Donald Sultana was gifted with a marvellous memory; he was a living encyclopaedia about early 19th century English authors and Maltese history and art in the early years of British rule. Above all, he was kindly and unfailingly generous. He did not, however, suffer fools gladly.
He was an Anglophile with a great knowledge of and love for Italian art, literature and culture. With his passing, Malta has lost one of the few remaining members of the remarkable Maltese generation that began to flower just before the War.
He is mourned not just by his brother Arnold and other relatives, but by a good many former students and by even more numerous admiring friends in Malta and abroad.