A Scholar and a Spy

Sir Thomas Bodley was one of the outstanding Englishmen of the Elizabethan age. His legacy, The Bodleian Library, is world famous, but little is widely known about the life of its founder. Here is his story as a childhood exile, a diplomat in the difficult closing years of Elizabeth I’s reign, and then as the man whose energy, foresight, intelligence and munificence created what is regarded as the greatest research library in the world.

Bodley was a complex character; an avuncular figure one moment and a heartless driver of his staff the next. He learnt Greek in Geneva as a 12-year-old, toured Europe after graduating from Oxford and became close to Queen Elizabeth as her Gentleman Usher. A Scholar and a Spy tells of the trials and tribulations of managing his Queen’s foreign policy in the Netherlands towards the end of the 16th century. It was here that he was to learn the art of espionage. It then describes how he went on to build his library and to introduce the English to books, thereby establishing a repository of knowledge.

Here is also the story of his library which has now nourished English cultural life for four centuries, earning its place at the heart of the nation’s history. The third part of the book takes an illustrated look at Bodley's legacy by featuring the extraordinary stories behind 30 or so of the Bodleian Library's greatest treasures. These include, amongst many others, the manuscript edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's first folio, a first edition of Don Quixote, a silk theatre programme dropped during an attempted assassination attempt on King George III, and the blood stained pubic hair of Lady Caroline Lamb contained in a letter to her lover Lord Byron.