Again the BBC apologised for broadcasting the show without editing out the offending words. The apology meant the BSC accepted the complaint had been resolved.Brass Eye Special (Channel 4): The show on child sex abuse in July last year provoked 246 complaints – and 171 letters of support. The BSC defended the programme as an acceptable satire on the media’s treatment of paedophilia but partially upheld the complaints because of the way children appeared to have been used in the filming.Question Time Special (BBC1): Philip Lader, above, a former US ambassador, was subjected to anti-American questioning,two days after the 11 September attacks. The BSC said the BBC’s public apology meant the complaint had been resolved.News on News Direct: Bulletins attributing the outbreak of foot and mouth to Chinese restaurants provoked 1,082 complaints, mostly of racism.

They were not upheld as the reports were fairly based on possible findings of Ministry of Agriculture investigations.. Peter James Armour, Italian scholar: born Fleetwood, Lancashire 19 November 1940; Professor of Italian, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College (later Royal Holloway, London University) 1989-99, Research Professor 1999-2002; died London 18 June 2002. Peter Armour was Professor of Italian at Royal Holloway, London University, from 1989. He took early retirement in 1999 but remained an active researcher, continuing with a part-time contract as Research Professor at the college for a further three years; his definitive retirement was to have been marked by a symposium on Dante, to be held in his honour at Royal Holloway at the beginning of July. It will now be held as a memorial tribute later in the year.Born in Fleetwood, Lancashire, in 1940, Armour studied at the Gregorian University in Rome, gaining a Licentiate in Philosophy in 1961. He did not proceed to ordination, but his time at the Gregorianum gave him both his love of Italy and the solid philosophical grounding which underpinned all his subsequent work.

He read Italian at Manchester University, graduating with first class honours in 1966.
He held lecturing posts at the universities of Sheffield and Leicester before moving to London University in 1979, to Bedford College. When in 1985 Bedford College left central London to merge with Royal Holloway College, Armour moved temporarily with the Italian Department to University College, before his appointment to a Chair at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College in 1989.Armour’s reputation as a Dante scholar will rest especially on his two books on the Purgatorio, The Door of Purgatory (1983) and Dante’s Griffin and the History of the World (1989). Starting in each case from a particularly complex and many-layered passage in the second cantica of Dante’s poem, these studies have far-reaching implications for our understanding of the Commedia as a whole. They both show Armour’s characteristic readiness to look afresh at the major issues in the interpretation of Dante’s text, and to point out the inadequacies of received opinion if it did not stand up to his rigorous scrutiny.Yet, his interpretations are never quirky or eccentric, but are based on a formidable mastery of the critical tradition and a sound understanding of Dante’s intellectual world.

The same qualities distinguish his shorter studies, whether of well-known problematic episodes, such as his 1983 article in Italian Studies on Dante’s treatment of his mentor Brunetto Latini, or of issues which most Dante commentators take for granted, but where he revealed previously unsuspected subtleties, as in the essay on the principle of contrapasso in the Inferno, published, also in Italian Studies, in 2000.It was not only in Dante studies that Armour was an original and penetrating scholar. His inaugural lecture at Royal Holloway in 1991 signalled another major interest which he was still pursuing at the time of his death: the intellectual background to Michelangelo’s works, especially the immense project for the tomb of Pope Julius II which occupied the artist for more than 30 years.In a series of studies published in the 1990s Armour traced Michelangelo’s struggle to give expression to those glimpses of divinity given to the human soul which it was the artist’s special responsibility to bring to light. He concluded one article, which appeared in 1997 in the Society for Italian Studies volume Sguardi sull’Italia, with a summary of the themes running through Michelangelo’s work: “Beauty mortal and immortal; ideal Love, both earthly and divine; Death, Time, and enduring Fame through art; and true immortality in Eternity.” Armour’s impressive command of the often obscure writings of Renaissance Neoplatonists did not prevent him from focusing on the fundamental questions that they sought to address; his scholarship was always subservient to the goal of understanding the highest aspirations of the human spirit. This readiness to grapple with the big questions about major figures was a feature of everything he wrote; figures don’t come much bigger than Dante and Michelangelo, and Armour has enriched our understanding of them both.His last public lecture was at a colloquium to mark the retirement of his friend Corinna Salvadori Lonergan at Trinity College Dublin, in April this year.