From Queen's College to National University: Essays on the Academic History of QCG/ UCG/NUI Galway (Four Courts Press, £30) is full of pictures of worthy, bewhiskered gents. Eminent Victorians, certainly, but some of them hid dark secrets - as this book, edited by Professor Tadhg Foley, illustrates.

Take a professor of surgery, James Valentine Browne, who had no qualifications at all for his post - he simply masqueraded as his dead cousin. Other professors had colourful or controversial pasts; Thomas Dillon, Liam O Briain and Valentine Steinberger spent periods in jail as political prisoners. Galway scholars also made academic headlines. Professor of natural philosophy George Johnstone Stoney named the electron; William King, the first professor of geology, named and established the antiquity of Neanderthal man; other terminologists include W.E. Hearn, the first professor of Greek, who coined the word plutology (to replace political economy) and Alfred Senier, professor of chemistry, who invented the term thermatropy to refer to compounds which change colour when heated.

Yet another scientist, Alexander Anderson, professor of natural philosophy, conceived of the notion of gravitational black holes.

NUI Galway can also boast the world's first woman engineering graduate, Alice Perry (1906). The same school produced Michael O'Shaughnessy, the engineer responsible for the Golden Gate Bridge.