Alexandre Anastasius Pallis was born on 20 October 1883 in Mumbai. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and subsequently worked for the Egyptian Civil Service. He became a Greek citizen and was both Governor of Corfu and Salonika. During World War II he was attached to the Greek government in exile. He died in Athens, Greece, on 26 June 1975.
Adam Clarke was a Wesleyan minister and theologian, serving three times as the President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference. Born in Ireland, he became a Methodist in 1778 and a minister in 1782, firstly in Bradford (Wiltshire). He also served in the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Ireland, rural Lancashire, and the Shetlands (where he was the effective planter of Methodism in the 1820s). He was a keen theologian with progressive views linking rationalism with spirituality. As a scholar, he studied a variety of subjects including folk tales, and romances, as well as Persian, Arabic, Ethiopian, Hindu, Coptic and Sanskrit texts, and subjects including alchemy and the occult, witchcraft, medical curiosities, astronomy, mineralogy, and conchology, while maintaining an overriding interest in the classics and the scriptures. He was involved in the conversion of 2 Buddhist monks from Sri Lanka.
He was elected a member of several learned including the British and Foreign Bible Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Royal Irish Academy, the Geological Society of London, the American Historical Institute, and was a founder member of the Royal Asiatic Society. Clarke died from an attack of cholera on 26 August 1832.
Angus C. Graham was born in 1919, in Penarth, Wales, and was educated in Penarth and Shropshire before attending Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he attained a BA in Theology in 1940. He served in the Royal Air Force during WWII, taking a Services Japanese course at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1944-45 which led to him acting as a Japanese interpreter in Malaya and Thailand from 1945-46. Graham attained a BA Hons Chinese from SOAS in 1949 and became a Chinese translator attached to the Malayan police in Penang from 1949-1950.
Graham took up his first academic post in 1950 as a Lecturer in Classical Chinese at SOAS completing his PhD thesis in 1953. He became a Reader in 1966, Professor of Classical Chinese in 1971 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1981. During this period he also was a Visiting Fellow of Hong Kong University (1954-55), Consulting editor of "Foundations of Language" (commencing 1964), a Visiting Professor at University of Michigan (1970) and a Fellow of the Society of Humanities, Cornell University (1972-73).
Graham's research focused mainly around Chinese and western philosophy. He was concerned with the relations between philosophical concepts and the structure of the Chinese language. He published many books and articles connected to his research. He was also interested in poetry and short story writing and translation of early Chinese poetry.
Graham was appointed Emeritus Professor of Classical Chinese at SOAS in 1984. Post-retirement from SOAS he held a number of visiting appointments including at the Institute of East Asian Philosophies, Singapore, Faculty of Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, Brown University, Rhode Island, and the Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Graham died on 26 March 1991.