Peter Waine

A lively, amusing, insightful and possibly unique account of what it is like to be a Master of an ancient livery company. The meetings with the great and the good , the ceremony in gilded halls, themselves the physical manifestation of centuries of history, the charitable giving, the modern relevance and crucial role liveries still play in defining the meaning and in lubricating the machinery of the City of London.

This study looks at this enigmatic person, our greatest classicist who penned some of the loveliest poetry ever written.He failed his Finals but still became Professor of Latin at both University College, London, and Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge. Despite being regarded as our greatest classicist he devoted 27 years to translating a Latin poet of the third rank whom Housman himself summed up as ' facile and frivolous.' Regarded as an intellectual machine and with the tools afforded him by his mastery of great prose Housman took up the challenge of textual criticism, rectifying in his mind the hitherto poor classical scholarship of his contemporaries and of those who preceded him. The author advocates a reason for these strange paradoxes, a theory not propounded, before that he was on the autistic spectrum.