One bright afternoon in the fall of 1948, a big car made its way through the streets of Oxford, England, bearing a tubby little old man with a scraggly mustache, who had come to take his first look at the university. At that time few Oxonians had ever heard of 70-year-old Antonin Besse. Nor did they know that he was the mysterious, anonymous French millionaire who had just given Oxford one of the biggest gifts in its history$6,000,000 for a new college (TIME, Jan. 31, 1949). But by last week, the whole university was...
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