Paul Cotton writes:
I am deeply saddened to learn of the death of Coral Bell. We were fellow students at the London School of Economics in 1953. I was hoping to be accepted for the New Zealand Department of External Affairs. She had already been in the Australian Department and had been one of the first Australian diplomats posted to the High Commission in Wellington and certainly the first woman.
She had left diplomacy to enter academia and we have all been grateful to her. I visited her in Canberra a few years ago to mark 50 years since we had last been in the LSE canteen together and she had told me of the Bulgarian bacillus used to make yoghurt, at that time something quite new to me.
She went on explaining the new to me through her scholarship.