PETER RUSSELL will be remembered as one of the great scholars of the 20th century. King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford, 1953-81, he belongs to that select band of academics who moved between history and literature, making lasting contributions to each.

He produced seminal work in Spanish medieval, renaissance and Golden Age literature and culture; in the political and dynastic history of the Iberian Peninsula during the late 14th century; and in the Portuguese discovery of the African Atlantic. To these fields he brought a human and logical approach, the product of a questing intellect and of a wealth of personal experience. This made him so much more than just a scholar.

Russell’s service to his country both before and during the Second World War stands comparison with his academic career. Recruited into the secret service in the mid-1930s, he was sent to Spain during the Civil War. There tours with parties of undergraduates and research in the archives of the peninsula provided cover for monitoring, among other things, the movements of Nationalist warships.

This assignment almost cost him his life when he was arrested photographing the cruiser Canarias near the port of Vigo. Though facing execution, he was released on the orders of Franco himself and after some difficulty obtaining exit papers made for the border town of Túy, from where he gratefully crossed into Portugal. Thereafter when the subject of Franco arose in conversation Russell was wont to recall how he owed his life to the Caudillo.

He returned to Oxford, where the outbreak of the Second World War brought him into MI6, though it was not until the summer of 1940 that his service began in earnest. Between June and August that year Russell was involved in ushering the Duke and Duchess of Windsor from Lisbon to the Bahamas where the former was installed as Governor for the duration. There were rumours, which Russell did little to dispel, that he was under orders to shoot them if they threatened to fall into German hands, though in later years he enjoyed cordial relations with them.

Thereafter Russell was involved in planning a British occupation of the Canary Islands in the event of Franco allowing the Germans safe passage across Spain to capture Gibraltar. He was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps in December 1940 and trained with MI5. At this time he suffered a motorcycle accident which left him permanently scarred and thereafter required the use of a denture. Years later he recalled the brutal treatment he received at Lochailort, the secret operations training centre on the West Coast of Scotland. Still convalescing, he was severely beaten during the part of his training intended to prepare him for the possibility of an enemy interrogation.

In 1942 Russell was appointed director of security in Jamaica where his duties ranged from examining the holds of ships calling at Kingston to the identification of possible German agents.

In 1943 he was sent to the Gold Coast where MI5 was engaged in security and counter-espionage activities against German agents and the Vichy French. The posting was of value to his subsequent research, and in his last work Russell paid tribute to the RAF pilots who had flown him to many of the places that loomed large in the Portuguese reconnaissance of Guinea during the 15th century.

Russell’s final assignment was to the Far East in 1944 and it was in Ceylon that he performed the most important service of his war career. As a result of breaking Japanese cyphers MI5 learnt of the existence of an Indian nationalist agent to whom the British gave the codename Carbuncle.

Carbuncle had been recruited to operate in Ceylon by the Japanese, but he was picked up and handed over for Russell to turn him using the double-cross system perfected with German agents in Europe. Against the threat of execution, the would-be agent agreed to transmit whatever intelligence the British saw fit to provide his controllers. Although this initially consisted of “chicken feed” — accurate data of limited value — the opportunity was eventually taken for a major exercise in disinformation.

In Carbuncle’s case this was an attempt to lure a Japanese cruiser out of Singapore. The bait was duly taken and, though Russell was evasive on the subject, the vessel in question may have been the heavy cruiser Haguro which was intercepted and sunk off Penang by a flotilla of British destroyers in May 1945.

The end of the war found Russell in Trincomalee in the rank of acting lieutenant- colonel. One episode he recalled was his interrogation of the Japanese commander in the Andaman Islands. Asking the officer why he had herded a large proportion of the native population into barges and then had them sunk by gunfire in deep water, he received the indignant reply that this had of course been necessary to ensure sufficient food for the garrison.

Before resuming his academic career at Oxford there remained one final duty: disposing of Carbuncle, which he was told to accomplish in whatever way he thought fit. It was suggested to him that Carbuncle might find a watery grave en route to Singapore. In the event, Russell could not bring himself to this and when the ship made Singapore he disembarked with his prisoner handcuffed to him. Russell unfettered them both and, to Carbuncle’s astonishment, told him to “F*** off!” The double agent was last seen disappearing into the crowd.

Peter Edward Lionel Russell was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1913. His father Bernard Wheeler was an officer in the Royal West Kent Regiment, his mother Rita the younger daughter of Thomas Russell who had made his fortune as a newspaper proprietor and businessman in New Zealand. After an acrimonious divorce Wheeler’s sons adopted their mother’s maiden name, and their father played no further part in their lives. Russell’s boyhood was divided between England and New Zealand.

After Cheltenham College, Russell went to The Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1931 to read French and Spanish. On an early journey to Spain he met many prominent Republican figures, notably Federico García Lorca. Taking a first in 1935, he turned to history and began research on a doctorate with the assistance of Sir Maurice Powicke, Regius Professor of Modern History, and the Balliol medievalist V. H. Galbraith. While acknowledging the grounding that Powicke, Galbraith and others had given him in diplomatics, Russell never shared the confidence of the traditional historian in the implicit veracity of original documentation. If there was one theme in his work it was the debunking not only of spurious claims by contemporaneous figures and their apologists, but also the efforts by subsequent scholarship and vested interests to recast history and literature in the service of a regime or ideology.

He was appointed to lectureships at St John’s College in 1937 and at Queen’s in 1938. The following year, his early research resulted in As Fontes de Fernão Lopes, a study of the 14th-century chronicler which appeared in Portuguese translation in 1941.

In 1955 Russell published his first major work, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II, an exquisitely crafted account of the political and dynastic upheavals which beset the peninsula in the late 14th century. In 1946 he had been elected a Fellow of Queen’s and appointed a university lecturer in Spanish, to be followed in 1953 by accession to the King Alfonso XIII Chair of Spanish Studies.

Soon, he was showing the scholarly range and dynamism for which he became famous. In 1951 he demonstrated to an astonished audience that the epic Cantar de Mio Cid had been composed not by a minstrel but by a poet with legal training writing a century later than was universally accepted. These conclusions were interpreted as an act of lèse-majesté against the doyen of Francoist scholarly orthodoxy, the venerable don, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and ruffled feathers in both Britain and Spain.

In 1953 came an article demonstrating that literary relations between Catholic Spain and Protestant England in the 17th century were closer than many dared imagine. A few years later, work started on a full-length biography of Prince Henry the Navigator, to whose sobriquet Russell added apostrophes once he established that the Infante’s seafaring experience consisted of a few trips between the Algarve and Morocco.

In 1960 Russell began his assault on the personality cult assiduously propagated by the Infante himself and remodelled by successive generations of the Portuguese ruling élite. A lecture on the subject, Prince Henry the Navigator, delivered at Canning House, home of the Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Council, so incensed the Portuguese Embassy that strenuous though unsuccessful efforts were made to block its publication. The demolition was completed in a valedictory lecture delivered at Oxford in 1983 and published under the apt title of Prince Henry the Navigator: The Rise and Fall of a Culture Hero (1984).

Meanwhile, Russell had moved into the literature of the Spanish Golden Age and in 1969 produced another of his seminal articles, Don Quixote as a Funny Book, in which he attacked the Romantic notion of Cervantes’ hero as a purely tragic figure. His magisterial survey, Cervantes, was published in 1985. Next he turned to the dialogue novel known as La Celestina, first in a series of essays and finally in a near- definitive edition which first appeared in 1991 (rev 1993, 2001). In between there had been Traducciones y traductores en la Península Ibérica, 1400-1550 (1985) and the superb primer Spain: A Companion to Spanish Studies (ed, 1973). His essays in Spanish literature Temas de la Celestina y otros estudios (del Cid al Quijote) were collected in 1978, and Portugal, Spain and the African Atlantic in 1995. By now well into his eighties, Russell turned once more to the Infante and in 2000 produced the long-awaited Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life.

Russell’s scholarship was matched by his stature as the pre-eminent teacher of Hispanic studies in the United Kingdom. He was a notable lecturer: clear, coherent, engaging. His tutorials, usually delivered at home, were conceived as a meeting of minds. Graduate students, meanwhile, were treated as friends and colleagues, their tutorials frequently shifted to a restaurant or reconfigured as part of a lengthy excursion at home or abroad. For all his massive erudition Russell never lost sight of scholarship as a civilising endeavour that had necessarily rather more to do with life than with the subject at hand.

Russell was showered with honours in Spain and Portugal, was elected FBA in 1977, received a DLitt from Oxford on his retirement in 1981 and was knighted in 1995. In 1989 he had been made a Commander of the Spanish Order of Isabel la Católica, receiving the same dignity in the Portuguese Order of the Infante Dom Henrique in 1993 — which Russell was amused to learn conferred the right to use a portable altar.

From his extensive flat in North Oxford, always replete with fine food and wine, Russell presided to his last days over a wide circle of scholars and friends. He never married.

Professor Sir Peter Russell, hispanist, was born on October 24, 1913. He died on June 22, 2006, aged 92.