The coincidence of title between this biography and Trollope’s novel of 1855 is wholly intentional, and more than a little mischievous. No one could have been less like Mr. Harding, that unworldly cleric who resigned the wardenship of an almshouse, a lucrative sinecure, on a matter of principle, than John Sparrow, who intrigued to obtain the Wardenship of All Souls, Oxford’s only college without any undergraduates, and went to pieces after he relinquished it. John Lowe, a long-standing friend of Sparrow’s, has had full access to his papers and has written an affectionate but unindulgent portrait, a cautionary tale about the vanity of human wishes as well as an elegy for a now irrecoverable ideal of academic freedom.

Born in 1906 into a wealthy manufacturing family, John Sparrow was the eldest of five children. His father, whom in adult life he could hardly bear to mention, was aloof and cold, his mother adoring but not uncritical. He appears to have been old from an early age, remarking at the age of three when rebuked for some piece of outspokenness, “You mustn’t say what you think, but what people like”—a piece of wisdom he largely ignored thereafter. Literary and artistic in nature, a collector of rare books from boyhood, but also a lifelong passionate football fan, he nonetheless had a patchy academic career at prep school and subsequently at Winchester College. He worked only at what interested him, chafing against the concentration on classical studies, which was then a