Sir Raymond Carr, who died last week at the grand age of 96, was the last survivor of a distinguished group of men – and they were all men – whose names were known across the world, lending lustre to Oxford where all had their base.

Many of them are pictured in the photograph on this page, which was taken at a meeting of The Club, for distinguished academic figures, at New College in 1976. They include the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, Disraeli’s biographer Lord Blake and the equally fine historian Hugh Trevor-Roper.

Missing from the group is a third historian of equal fame, Lord Bullock, who was Master of St Catherine’s at the time. One of the most courteous men, he is one of a very small group – I can count them on one hand – who during my 46 years as a journalist have taken the trouble to send me a thank-you letter following an interview.

Likewise absent, and of great international fame, too, was the Professor of Modern History, Richard Cobb. As at least one of Sir Raymond’s obituarists observed, his was a name as revered in France as Carr’s had been in Spain, the principal area of his academic interest.

The host of The Club gathering was the Warden of New College, Sir William Hayter, a gentleman well known to me at the time. Until reading Raymond’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph I had been unaware of the fact that Hayter had pipped Carr to the post for the wardenship in what was described as “a characteristically envenomed election”.

The obituarist added: “In any case, what has been called the somewhat Lenten social life of New College was no more to Carr’s taste than to that of his friend AJ Ayer, and in 1964 he left without too heavy a heart to become director of the university’s new Latin American centre and a fellow of St Antony’s.”

For Bill Hayter, the position of Warden was something of a second-best. With what seemed surprising candour he once told me that he only switched to a career in academia when it became apparent, after his stint at British ambassador in Moscow, that he was not going to get either of the plum diplomatic appointments in New York or Paris.

I got to know Hayter as a consequence of renting, for a couple of years or so, the delightful property in Stanton St John that became his and wife Iris’s retirement home. (Did you know Lady Hayter is a Hoare?” someone once said to me, a remark capable of an unfortunate misunderstanding.) That I was permitted to become tenant of Bassett’s House, along with two journalistic colleagues, owed quite a lot to the fact, I always thought, that one of my mates was able to drop into conversation during an interview in the Warden’s Lodgings at New College (which is a bit like a country house plonked down in the middle of Oxford) the name of another of our men in Moscow, Sir Duncan Wilson, then Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Sandy Tait’s dad was his GP in Islay, where he had a holiday home.

Mention of Sir Duncan reminds me that I must amend, in two respects, the assertions made in my opening sentence. Sir Raymond was not the last survivor of a distinguished Oxford group; nor were they all men. Still with us, aged 91, is Wilson’s younger sister, Baroness Warnock, the philosopher and former head of Oxford High.

A month of two before The Club meeting photographed, I had interviewed Raymond Carr about his book English Fox Hunting, A History, which had just been published. Our talk touched on a topic rehearsed in all of the obituaries, his predilection for the upper classes.

As his old friend Nicholas Mosley (Lord Ravensdale) noted in his appreciation of Raymond in The Spectator, his acquaintance with many of the grandest people in England could be explained in the fact that, “Well, there’s no one quite like him.”

I last talked to Raymond, side by side with Nick, both in wheelchairs, at Badminton House in the summer of 2011 on the sad occasion of the funeral of his second son, Matthew, who was married to the Duke of Beaufort’s daughter, Lady Anne Somerset. After his loss, according to The Times, “a devastated Carr stopped writing”.