Those that sat before us

I AM writing to you with reference to the most interesting article about famous writing). I was very fortunate to be able to acquire, from his son, the desk of Maurice Wilkins, who won the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick for the discovery of the DNA double helix in 1962. This desk () is all the more interesting because his son told me that Wilkins, who used it daily in his private study, had inherited it from his own sister, whose rooms it furnished in Oxford before the war (she was an academic and a translator of Kafka, among others), and that he had personally carried out repairs to it as an amateur and skilled craftsman. A nice handover story.