Born in Broadstairs, he began his education as a choral scholar at St Peter's, the local Church of England school, at seven he began piano lessons.
Chris Patten, the university's chancellor, said in a statement that Richardson's "distinguished record both as an educational leader and as an outstanding scholar provides an excellent basis for her to lead Oxford in the coming years".
Since the 15th century, the followers of local saint-scholar Srimanta Sankardeva, who venerate the god Vishnu, have been building monasteries, or satras, here.
The Australian's foreign editor Greg Sheridan went to Sydney University with Tony Abbott, before Abbott went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and did not do very well in his degree.
Jonathan Jones's article on Penelope Curtis, outgoing director of Tate Britain, (misogynist subtext?) is a highly unpleasant attack on a formidable scholar and curator.
Unlike some of her relatives he was never a great scholar or a famous writer; and when her grandmother fell in love with him, her side of the family regarded him as an uninspiring catch.
I sat back in my seat, amazed and haunted by this extraordinary scholar, out there in the desert, gathering and patterning a work of words that might keep us from slipping off into abstract space.
The monograph is still the thing: anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a scholar in the humanities should work towards having one.
He could have been distinguished in academic life his work on Herodotus suggests that he could have made his mark as a classical scholar but his excursions into English verse, collected, in 1990, from several slim volumes, hardly suggest that we lost a poet when we gained a politician.
That honour, instead, went to John Wycliffe, a 14th-century theologian, scholar and clerical troublemaker who translated the Bible into English in the 1380s, and argued for much of his life against the power and wealth of the pope – a somewhat edgy pastime that led to his bones being dug up and burned after his death, before being chucked into a river in Leicestershire.
Q: How did you move from being a geologist working in Australia for the Western Mining Corporation to being a scholar of the history of science?
