His grandmother was Jewish, his mother a Lutheran Protestant, his father, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, an official atheist who was first secretary of the Communist Party and later a socialist minister.The young Frossard discovered religion when he entered a chapel to look for a friend in July 1935. Also he liked to single out quotations from French authors which he thought explained France. Thus, in one of his last pieces, he wrote of Anatole de Monzie, a largely forgotten politician of the Third Republic whom he surprisingly described as talented, erudite and a great orator, and quoted him as saying, “One must never forget that if the French adore revolutions, they are horrified by change.” Why quote this in January 1995? Is it true? One remembers Frossard’s fewsentences for much longer than the important and well- informed articles that surrounded them.
Frossard’s delight was to surprise And he was well-placed to do this. Always sharp and direct, invariably witty, often ironic, frequently hostile and invariably personal, Frossard’s articles were, somehow inevitably, described as “typically French”, a description that he disliked, in spite of having written a book called Excusez-moi d’etre francais (1992). “Cavalier Seul” as it was called (which can perhaps b e translated as “Going it Alone”) became the French equivalent of what used to be a British institution, the Times fourth leader, but it was never much longer than a hundred words.

For the last 30 years or so many readers of Le Figaro, both British and French, have begun the day by looking first at the foot of the front page, where Andre Frossard’s column was to be found. David Guy Barnabas Kindersley, stone-carver and type designer: born Codicote, Hertfordshire 11 June 1915; MBE 1979; married 1939 Christina Sharpe (two sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1957 Barbara Pym Eyre Petrie (marriage dissolved), 1986 Lida Lopes Cardozo (three sons); died Cambridge2 February 1995.. Together, they made his last decade, productive as ever, singularly happy as well. Latterly, with his domed head and patriarchal beard, he looked rather like Durer’s St Paul, with the same direct and full eyes. His voice and way of speech was equally direct and compelling, though never assertive.

He made a wonderful contrast with Lida Lopes Cardozo, all red hair and electricity, who came to be his apprentice – “I don’t take apprentices any more,” he said, but she stayed, and became his wife and the mother of three delightful boys. Tall and thin, with large long hands, he was surprisingly strong as well as adroit in all physical movements. Even the coloured lithographs that he did on his return from California had a message that was augmented, not concealed, by the polychrome form in which each was conceived.His natural taste was equally expressed in the three places in which he lived and worked, the great barn at Barton, the medieval tower rising improbably from suburban Chesterton and, lastly, the Victorian Gothic school building naturally enlarged to meetthe needs of workshop and his new family.In all these different places, David Kindersley was a commanding figure. The task of providing mechanical rules for the correct optical spacing of letters appealed to his sense of logic.In all this he was an artist, as well as a craftsman, but he never made the mistake of confusing the essential purpose of letters with some personal or selfish vision of their function.