The death of Peter Green, in the autumn of 2024, a few months before he reached his century, robbed me of my oldest friend, the world of a rare and versatile scholar.
I first met P.M. (for Morris, as in William) G. in early 1951 Cambridge, while seeking a fourth for afternoon Bridge, reportedly a hobby of his, as it remains, now in solitaire form, of mine. We had been a seven-fingered handful of years apart in the Charterhouse School classical sixth. Top echelon scholars were coached by Beaks whose Latin and Greek rendered them prestigious in Brooke Hall, the masters’ Combination Room. Entrance scholarship winners unlikely to gain Oxbridge awards in classics were shunted into History, Physics, Mathematics. Some later gained university awards; none the kudos of the alpha platoon in the classical sixth. Four of my contemporaries gained major Oxbridge open scholarships, two when only seventeen.

The school motto, Dei Dante Dedi, was the daintily alliterative, dubiously grammatical composition of Thomas Sutton. Having made a fortune out of thick strands of coal discovered under his family farm near Newcastle, Sutton founded the school in 1611, down payment for celestial advancement. Originally endowed for poor scholars, its Charterhouse-in-Southwark cloisters proved too constricted as the school’s fame grew and commercial London swarmed around it, the Tube clattering above. By the time of its voluntary rustication, in 1872, Charterhouse had mounted to the elite nine Public Schools, never as high in the ratings as Eton and Winchester.

Translated to a wide flat hilltop in open country, near Godalming in ...