Anita Harding died of cancer at the age of 42 just before she was to take up the Chair in Clinical Neurology at the Institute of Neurology in Queen Square, London. She was the most outstanding British neurological clinician of her generation and a world authority on inherited neurological diseases. She was also enormous fun.
In her final weeks, when she knew she was going to die, her main concerns were for those she would leave behind, particularly her colleagues and students, whose affairs and projects she set straight from her hospital bed.
Never able to resist impish quips, accompanied by a grin and a characteristic darting of the tongue, she was even able to muse on the potential compensations as well as the tragedy of her early death: "At least I won't have to buy Windows '95!"