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Robert Calverley Trevelyan was born on 28 June 1872, the son of Sir George Trevelyan and his wife Caroline. After attending Harrow, Trevelyan was admitted to Trinity College on 15 June 1891. He graduated from Cambridge in 1894 with a BA and LLB, having take examinations in Classics Part I and Law Part II. Although his father wanted him to become a barrister, Trevelyan pursued a career as a poet. He published numerous works during his lifetime, many of them translations from ancient authors.

Trevelyan married the Dutch violinist Elizabeth des Amorie van der Hoeven. The artist Julian Trevelyan was their son.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889 in Vienna, the son of Karl Wittgenstein, a wealthy steel industrialist. He studied at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg whence he moved in 1908 to the University of Manchester to study aeronautics where he designed a primitive jet-turbine engine. The mathematics required for his studies in engineering brought him to consider the philosophy of mathematics and to seek out Bertrand Russell at Trinity College Cambridge, with whom he studied, at first on an unofficial basis. In January 1912 he was admitted to Trinity where he spent five terms before moving to Skjolden in Norway, where he thought he might work on logic in peaceful surroundings.

At the outbreak of war, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian army, fighting on the Eastern and Southern fronts before he was captured by the Italians in 1918. During his incarceration, he was able to finish the work which was to become the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, later published in 1922. The war clearly had a profound effect on Wittgenstein, who, shortly after his release gave away the fortune that he had inherited from his father and resolved to lead a life of simplicity.

Wittgenstein now took up the career of schoolteacher, holding positions in a number of schools in Lower Austria, but he was not always sufficiently sensitive to the needs of the slower children. In 1926 he was forced to leave after hitting a young pupil, and he returned to Vienna to design a house for his sister.

In 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge on the prompting of Frank Ramsey and in June received the degree of PhD, submitting the Tractatus as his dissertation. In the following year he was elected to a senior research fellowship of Trinity College, which he held for six years. At the same time he was a lecturer in the Moral Sciences faculty, during which time the Blue and Brown books were dictated to his pupils. In 1939 he succeeded G E Moore as Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy. During WWII he worked as a porter in Guy's hospital and as a laboratory assistant in a laboratory in Newcastle looking into shell shock. He returned to his duties in Cambridge at the end of the war, but resigned from his chair in 1947. In 1948 and 49 he lived in Ireland but returned to England, dying in Cambridge in 1951.

Frazer was born 1 January 1854 in Glasgow, and after graduating MA in 1874 from the University of Glasgow, entered Trinity College with a scholarship. He was Second Classic in 1878, and a year later was made a Fellow of the College on the strength of his dissertation, "The Growth of Plato’s Ideal Theory”. This Title Alpha Fellowship, for which no duties were required, was renewed as a Title B fellowship (for those 'engaged in the systematic study of some important branch of literature or science') in 1885 and 1890, before becoming qualified to hold a Pension Fellowship in 1895, at which time it became tenable for life.

“The Golden Bough”, the work for which Frazer is best known, was first published in 1890. The book drew on a comprehensive amount of data and traced common evolutionary patterns in the development of seemingly disparate cultures worldwide. His evolutionary theory of societal development, in which societies moved from a belief in primitive magic, to religion, to science was expanded over three editions, which ballooned from two, to three, to twelve volumes, with an additional volume (“Aftermath”) twenty years later.

Frazer followed “The Golden Bough” with other anthropological works, including “Totemism and Exogamy” (1910), “The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead” (1913-1924), “Folk-Lore in the Old Testament” (1918), “The Worship of Nature” (1926), “Myths of the Origin of Fire” (1930), “The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion” (1933), and the four volume “Anthologia Anthropologica. The Native Races of Africa and Madagascar [and Australasia, Asia and Europe, and America]” (1938-1939). His first published work was the revised edition of George Long’s “C. Sallusti Crispi Catalina et Iugurtha” (1884); he continued to produce works of classical scholarship at intervals, with editions of “Pausanias’s Description of Greece” (1898), Apollodorus’s “The Library” (1921), and Ovid’s “Fasti” (one for Macmillan, 1929, one for Loeb, 1931). He also produced more literary works, editing the letters of William Cowper (1912) and essays of Joseph Addison (1915), and writing a series of articles in Addison’s style, “Sir Roger de Coverley” in “The Saturday Review” (1915, published as a book in 1920).

In 1896, he married Lilly Grove (born Elizabeth Johanna de Boys Adelsdorfer in 1854/5), a French widow with two children, Charles Grenville Grove (1878-1949) and Lilly Mary Grove (c 1880-1919). Lilly’s first husband Charles Baylee Grove had been a captain in the British merchant service; they married in 1877, he died in January 1889. Lilly was a French teacher who produced French schoolbooks and plays and promoted the use of phonographic records in the teaching of languages. Her publications include “Scenes of Familiar Life” (1896), “Berthes aux grands pieds” (1902), “Histoire de Monsieur Blanc” (1910), and “Je sais un conte” (1911). She was working on a book on the history of dance when she met Frazer (“Dancing”, 1895), and later wrote a book for children based on “The Golden Bough”, entitled “Leaves from the Golden Bough” (1924). She also translated one of his books, “Adonis” in 1921, and several works by French scholars, including Albert Houtin’s “A Short History of Christianity” (1926) and François Aulard’s “Christianity and the French Revolution” (1927). In the 1930s she commissioned an operetta based on her story “The Singing Wood”, and co-authored a book with James, a small book entitled “Pasha the Pom: the Story of a Little Dog” (1937).

Lilly had a highly developed business sense, and stepped into the role of James’s manager and press agent, promoting him in Britain as well as the continent, where she arranged for his works to be translated into French. James received many honours, most notably a knighthood in 1914, followed by the Order of Merit in 1925. He was named to the first chair of social anthropology in Britain at the University of Liverpool in 1908, was inducted into numerous societies, awarded a number of honorary degrees, and was particularly pleased by a lectureship in anthropology established in his honour in 1922. He was very often in the news, referenced whenever folklore or myth were discussed, and wrote a number of articles for both academic journals and popular newspapers, including a much-reproduced opinion piece in “The Morning Post” in 1925, in favour of forgiveness of the French war debt.

After James suffered a dramatic loss of sight while giving a lecture in May 1931, he and Lilly travelled to Switzerland for a number of eye operations, which were temporarily helpful, but failed to stave off an eventual near blindness. Secretaries were employed as James revised and added to earlier works in the later 1930s. Lilly became increasingly deaf herself. In the late 1930s, they moved from accommodation in London to 7 Causewayside in Cambridge, where they died within a day of each other: James on 7 May and Lilly on 8 May, 1941.