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1869 — Stent appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, succeeding brain-boxes like Isaac Newton, Thomas Turton and Charles Babbage. Look ‘em up — all gems, so I’m told. If said Chair were a literal piece of furniture, it would be hand-carved by Chippendale and covered in a three-inch layer of gold flake. The Lucasian Professorship comes complete with loads of wonga, a free house, all the bowing and scraping students you can eat and high tea with the dean’s sister every Thursday. Stent barely warms the Lucasian with his bottom before skipping on to occupy an even more exalted seat, the Plumian Chair of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy. It’s only officially a Chair — everyone in Cambridge calls it the Plumian Throne.

1872 — the book-length expansion of Diffractive Properties lands Stent the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. This is like the V. C. of science. Wear that little ribbon and lesser astronomers swallow their chalk with envy when you walk by.

1873 — Stent publishes again! On an Inequality of Long Period in the Motions of the Earth and Venus so radically revises the Solar Tables set out a generation earlier by Jean Baptiste Delambre that the Delambre Formulae are tossed into the bin and replaced by the Stent Formulae. J-B is dead, or Moriarty would have to queue up behind him for the job of Nev’s arch-enemy, methinks.

1878 — Stent knighted by Her Majesty, Queen Victoria — who couldn’t even count her own children, let alone calculate an indice of diffraction — and is therefore universally hailed the greatest astronomical mathematician of the age. Rivals choke on their abacus beads. Naturally, Sir Nevil is also appointed Astronomer Royal and allowed to play with all the toys and telescopes in the land. Gets first pick of which bits of the sky to look at. Can name any cosmic bodies he discovers after his cats. The AR position comes with Flamsteed House, an imposing official residence — Greenwich Observatory is tacked onto it, rather like a big garden shed. Lesser mortals have to throw themselves on the ground before Sir Nevil Airey Stent if they want to take so much as a shufti at the man in the moon.

Cast your glims over that little lot, and consider the picture of Sir Nevil in the rotogravure. Tall, fair-haired, eyes like a romantic poet, strong arms from working an alt-azimuth mount, winning little boy smile. Mrs. Sir Nevil is the former Caroline Broughton-Fitzhume, second daughter of the Earl of Stoke Poges, reckoned among the beauties of the age. Tell me you don’t hate the swot right off the bat.

Now … imagine how you’d feel about Stent if you were a skull-faced, reptile-necked, balding astronomical-mathematical genius ten years older than the Golden Youth of Greenwich Observatory. Though recognized as a serious brain, your career has scarcely stretched beyond being ousted from an indifferent, non-Plumian chair — no more than a stool, they say — at a provincial university few proper dons would toss a mortar-board at. If you aren’t grinding your teeth with loathing, you probably lost them years ago.

Stent. It’s even a horrible name, isn’t it?

All the Dictionary of National Biography business I found out later. When Professor Moriarty, tense as a coiled cobra and twice as venomous, slithered into the reception room of the digs we shared in Conduit Street brandishing a copy of The Observatory — trade journal for astronomers, don’t you know — I’d have been proud to say I had never heard of the flash nob who was giving that evening’s lecture to the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House.

My understanding was that my flat-mate and I were due to attend an exclusive sporting event in Wapping. Contestants billed as ‘Miss Lilian Russell’ and ‘Miss Ellen Terri’ in the hope punters might take them for their near look-alikes Lillian Russell and Ellen Terry, were to face off, stripped to drawers and corsets, and Indian-wrestle in an arena knee-deep in custard. My ten bob was on Ellen to shove Lilian’s face into the yellow three falls out of four. I was scarcely best-pleased