He was a blameless professor at the University of Birmingham, and his essay was written for an obscure journal of philology in Helsinki.

NEWYORKER: The English Wars

According to Mr Shamdasani, an eminent historian of psychology and psychiatry at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, these included medical psychology, philology, anthropology, history, philosophy, theology and biology.

ECONOMIST: Carl Gustav Jung

At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable.

NEWYORKER: The Dragon��s Egg