For the last three years I have paid scant attention to the three figures who stand meditating outside my office window.   But as we prepare to decamp to Blackfriars whilst Pennethorne’s great building in Burlington Gardens is renovated, I thought I should record their appearance in all its sooty magnificence.   Like the philosophers outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, they stand sentinel, as guardians of learning:-

This is Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French mathematician:- This is Goethe:- This is Galileo:-