Short answers, pulled from the story.
Geoffrey Stephen Kirk (1921-2003) was a British classicist and the 35th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge. He was known for his studies of pre-Socratic philosophy and Homeric poetry, culminating in a six-volume commentary on the Iliad published between 1985 and 1993.
Kirk served in the Levant Schooner Flotilla, an Allied naval organisation operating in the Aegean Sea. He commanded a caique, a small Aegean fishing boat used for coastal landings, and distinguished himself through communication with Greek resistance forces. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in August 1945.
Published in 1954, Heraclitus: the Cosmic Fragments is a scholarly edition and study of the fragments left by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. Gregory Vlastos, a leading interpreter of Plato, described it as compelling readers to reconsider things previously taken for granted.
The Presocratic Philosophers is a 1959 volume co-authored by Kirk and the classicist John Raven. The Hellenist Hugh Lloyd-Jones called it an invaluable substitute for earlier treatments of pre-Socratic philosophy.
Kirk's Iliad commentary is a six-volume philological study of Homer's epic, published between 1985 and 1993. Kirk wrote the first two volumes alone; the remaining four were produced with classicists Mark W. Edwards, Richard Janko, Nicholas Richardson, and John B. Hainsworth. The Guardian praised it as coherent and wide-ranging in interpretation.
Kirk reflected on his Aegean wartime service in a 1997 memoir entitled Towards The Aegean Sea.