Dinner Balliol College Oxford

I was lucky enough to have dinner in Balliol College, Oxford University tonight for 21st celebration with colleagues from Cochrane Collaboration. It was a bit like a scene from Harry Potter!

Balliol College was founded in about 1263 and is renowned for producing Prime Ministers (Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, and Edward Heath), as well as literary figures (Robert Southey, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, Aldous Huxley, Nevil Shute, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, Robertson Davies, and Robert Browning). Four Nobel-prize winning scientists studied here: Oliver Smithies, C.N. Hinshelwood, Baruch Blumberg, and Anthony Leggett.

John Wycliffe, who inspired the first translations of the Latin Bible into English, was one of the College's Masters in the fourteenth century. Adam Smith, of The Wealth of Nations fame, was here from 1740-1746. In the twentieth century Balliol man William Beveridge led the development of modern social welfare.

More recent well-known alumni have included Paul Almond, Richard Dawkins, Peter Snow, Bill Drayton, Christopher Hitchens, Cressida Dick, Nicola Horlick, Robert Peston, Boris Johnson, Yvette Cooper, Stephanie Flanders, Amit Chaudhuri, Rana Dasgupta, and Dan Snow.