Madam, - Frank McNally remarks on some of the famous (and not so famous) individuals who lie buried in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, including Keats and Shelley, Antonio Gramsci, and many others of every nationality and none (An Irishman's Diary, May 10th).
Among the "smattering of Irish" whom he also mentions he might have included John Bagnell Bury (1861-1927), arguably the greatest historian this country has produced in the modern era.
Holder of two professorships simultaneously in Trinity College, Dublin (Modern History, from 1893) and the Regius Chair of Greek (from 1898), Bury was called to heaven (i.e., the Regius Chair of Modern History in Cambridge) in 1902. The leading authority in his time on the Later Roman Empire, editor of Gibbon's famous Decline and Fall, and author of the first truly authoritative biography of St Patrick (1905) he retired to Rome, where he is now buried.
A gravestone inscription not remarked by your Diarist recalls one Jim Dolen (1916-1965), "Actor, beloved son and fiancé, humble, genuine gentleman, now starring in 'Eternity' ".
Bury's headstone is a more modest affair. He deserves a biography.
- Yours, etc,
Prof Dáibhí Ó CRÓINÍN, Department of History, NUI Galway.