Exeter College, Oxford

Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister, CBE is an English former athlete best known for running the first mile in less than 4 minutes. Bannister became a... distinguished neurologist and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, before retiring in 2001. Sir Roger was the inaugural recipient of the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year award in January 1955 . Roger Bannister was born in Harrow, England. He went to Vaughan Primary school in Harrow before going on to be educated at the City of Bath Boys' School, University College School, London, Exeter College and Merton College, Oxford, and at St Mary's Hospital Medical School . Bannister was inspired by miler Sydney Wooderson's remarkable comeback in 1945. Eight years after setting the mile record and seeing it surpassed during the war years by the great Swedish runners Arne Andersson and Gunder Hägg, Wooderson regained his old form and challenged Andersson over the distance in several races. Wooderson lost to Andersson but set a British record of 4:04.2 in Göteborg on 9 September.
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William Woodard "Will" Self is an English journalist, novelist and short story writer. His fictional style is known for being satirical, grotesque,... and fantastical. He is a prolific commentator on contemporary British life, with regular appearances on Newsnight and Question Time. He has also appeared on the comedy panel show Have I Got News for You, though he has since declared that he will not make any further appearances on the show. Self was raised, in his words, in "an effortlessly dull" North London suburb by "intellectually snobbish parents". His father was Peter Self, Professor of Public Administration at the London School of Economics and Professor of Urban Research at the Australian National University, and his mother a Jewish American immigrant who worked as a publisher's assistant. Through his father, Self is a descendant of minister Nathaniel Woodard. Despite the intellectual encouragement given by his parents, Self was an emotionally confused and self-destructive child, harming himself with cigarette ends and knives before getting into drugs in his teenage years.
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Richard Burton, CBE was a Welsh actor. He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award, six of which were for Best Actor in a Leading Role , and... was a recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe and Tony Awards for Best Actor. Although never trained as an actor, Burton was, at one time, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. He remains closely associated in the public consciousness with his second wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor; the couple's turbulent relationship was rarely out of the news. Richard Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins in the village of Pontrhydyfen, Neath Port Talbot, Wales. He grew up in a working class, Welsh-speaking household, the twelfth of thirteen children. His father, Richard Walter Jenkins, was a short, robust coal miner, a "twelve-pints-a-day man" who sometimes went off on drinking and gambling sprees for weeks. Burton later claimed, by family telling, that "He looked very much like meThat is, he was pockmarked, devious, and smiled a great deal when he was in trouble. He was, also, a man of extraordinary eloquence, tremendous passion, great violence.
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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high... fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature there from 1945 to 1959. He was a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After his death, Tolkien's son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda, and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
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