He was educated at Chigwell School, where he received what must have been an excellent grounding both in classical languages and in the sciences, and this he carried with him to Balliol College, Oxford, to which he was admitted in 1946. If visitors were surprised by his high spirits, which deserted him only in his very worst moments, the truth is that he had no other way to live.Williams was the son of a civil servant, and was born and brought up in Essex. Throughout his illness his intellectual powers remained undimmed, and he drew on them to complete the book upon which he was already engaged when he fell ill, and which appeared under the title Truth and Truthfulness in September 2002. The immediate cause of death was a heart attack, but it concluded a long and often painful struggle with cancer of the spine, diagnosed some four years earlier.
The astonishing youthfulness of body and spirit which Williams maintained into his late sixties sometimes made it difficult for his friends to think of him as a sick man.

The philosopher Bernard Williams died in a Rome hospital at the end of what was a brief family holiday in Italy He was 73. The atmosphere was so relaxed (absolutely key) that it didn’t matter that the dinner table wasn’t laid and that we fell over the box of empties at the front door! Deborah’s dinner was much more like a salon And as for that heavenly fish pie…. And regardless of what people say, there are no rules about things like that; if you are having a good time, it doesn’t matter.VictoriaI am totally mortified; I had so much champagne that I totally blanked on the address and haven’t sent Deborah a thank-you letter I loved her dinner party. What was so nice was that it was all about elbows on the table. And I just love the fact that Deborah had clearly spent about 24 hours stoning olives. MeredithI can’t remember having enjoyed a dinner party as much; every one of the guests had something interesting to say. “Mummy,” he asks, “how come all you gave me for lunch was a sandwich with nothing in the middle?” “Darling,” I say, “I love you very much, but do you have to speak so loudly?’The Dinner Party Inspectors’ is on Channel 4 at 8.30pm tonight And the Dinner Party Inspectors’ verdict…

Have no memory of doing either.3.30pm: I pick up my son from school. I just have a very deep voice!” My friends are well stuck in.Midnight-3am: Anyone’s guess, more or less, although I think the whisky came out.8am, next morning: Discover that, miraculously, I had not only cleaned up before going to bed but had also made my son’s packed lunch. I don’t remember much of this beyond Meredith trying to order a cab and bellowing: “No, I am not a man. Mick Jagger could not be included because Victoria said: “I would sleep with him happily!” The menfolk, who are rubbish about this sort of thing, can only come up with Posh.11pm: The Dinner Party Inspectors go. Actually, being Meredith, she puts it rather more plainly than that; she says: “Let’s vote for our top five mercy fucks!” Andrew Lloyd Webber is a popular choice, as are Robin Cook, Jeremy Beadle, John Redwood and Tom Cruise.