It says that the British state is prepared to forgive historical homosexual acts providing they were performed by a national hero, academic giant or world-changing innovator.
Finally, Owens suggests employing intermediaries to seek and interpret the results of relevant academic research, since "hero researchers" who manage both an academic career and active dissemination of their research to policy communities are an unrealistic concept.
INDIANA JONES is the ultimate action-hero academic: played by Harrison Ford, the indomitable professor outwits Nazis and other villains in search of religious relics, lost temples and alien artefacts.
The novel's hero, young academic Persse McGarrigle, meets a Japanese academic, Akira Sakazaki, in a Tokyo karaoke bar and finds that the only novelist he personally knows, Ronald Frobisher, is also the only English writer whom Akira translates.
Even as he is denounced on talk radio, whispered about in his quiet neighborhood and attacked in multiple languages on the Internet, Dr. Mirkin is being celebrated as a hero for academic freedom.
In the garden of a terraced house in Oxford, on the hottest, sunniest day of the year, I meet Professor James R Flynn, an American-born academic who is a hero to many people.
DeMarinis, whose last novel was "The Mortician's Apprentice," doesn't strain himself to pull the sinister doings at La Siberia into a coherent plot, but he pumps plenty of black-comedy gusto into his renegade hero's academic breakdown and moral recovery.
Polyakov has won several awards for his spaceflight and academic achievements, including the Hero of the Soviet Union/Russian Federation, Order of Lenin, Order of the Legion of Honour, and the Order of Parasat.
But the idea that an academic becomes some kind of hero by the cost-free act of denying other academics the right to play in the communal sandbox (yes, this is third-grade stuff) is as pathetic as it is laughable.
Brown's recurrent hero is an academic turned detective, a so-called "symbologist" from Harvard whose special skill is the reassuring decipherment of riddles, while the protagonist of The Prague Cemetery is a professional forger, a malcontent who fakes documents for a living.
