C. Northcote Parkinson, R I P.

C Northcote Parkinson, who died in March at the age of 83, was at first glance a man of remarkable achievement; and on second glance a man of even more remarkable achievement. A distinguished British naval historian, he was a professor at the University of Malaya in 1955 when his life was transformed by an article he wrote for The Economist, inspiring a Boston publisher to commission what was to be a best-selling book and triggering a second career on the American lecture circuit. His subject entered the language-- "Parkinson's Law": Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Parkinson proved his point with a devastating deadpan discussion of the extraordinary inverse relationship between the Royal Navy's number of capital ships and civilian personnel--and a savagely satirical mockscientism that uncannily anticipated the great eruption of business-school bombast.

Professor Parkinson's later essays were sometimes dismissed as mere imitations of this first brilliant success. But a careful reading reveals astonishing intellectual fertility. Thus he presaged in a few lucid sentences the key insights of both supply-side and public-choice economics, and argued for smallness and against complexity at a time when economists were fixated on planning and "technostructure." But by the time the world moved his way, he had serenely gone on ("I'd said my say") to such interests as mock biographies of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and C.S. Foresters Horatio Hornblower, as well as and his own series of naval novels. This, and his courageous conservatism, probably contributed to his relative eclipse. The only American school with the sense to maintain a relationship with him was Alabama's Troy State University, where he was Honorary President. After I profiled him in Forbes on his eightieth birthday, I was surprised to be unable to interest any American agent in managing his literary estate. Professor Parkinson might have done better to be prolix, boring, and algebraic. Posterity, however, will prefer his style, wit, and truth. R I P.