Antony Copley

Antony R. H. Copley (1 July 1937 – 18 July 2016) was a British historian. He was an honorary professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and specialised in nineteenth century French history and modern Indian history.

He was born on 1 July 1937 in Hertfordshire, the son of Alan Copley, a solicitor, and Iris Copley, and educated at Gresham's School and Worcester College, Oxford.^[1]

In 1967, he joined the staff at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and was granted an honorary professorship when he retired.^[2]

In 1959 Copley was found by the police in a public lavatory and arrested for importuning with immoral purposes. On the advice of his solicitor father, he pleaded guilty.^[1] At the time of his death he was looking forward to a general pardon for men who like himself had been convicted of homosexual acts.^[1][3]

• Sexual Moralities in France, 1780-1980: New Ideas on the Family, Divorce, and Homosexuality: An Essay on Moral Change, Routledge (1989)
• Gandhi: Against the Tide, Oxford University Press (1996)
• Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact and Conversion in Late-Colonial India, Oxford India Paperbacks, 2000
• Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule (Global Encounters: Studies in Comparative Political Theory) by Anthony J. Parel, Judith M. Brown, Antony Copley and Fred Dallmayr (2000)
• Gurus and their followers: New religious reform movements in Colonial India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195649581 (2000)
• A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writings of Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood, Lexington, (2006)
• Hinduism in Public and Private Reform, Hindutva, Gender, and Sampraday, Oxford India Paperbacks, 2009
• Music and the Spiritual: Composers and Politics in the 20th Century, Ziggurat, (2012)
• A Memoir: Historian and Homosexual: Search for a Postwar Identity: Edited Diaries and Journals, Fastprint publishing, (2016)