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Caius Coriolanus Robert Ralph Bolgar (1913 – 23 June 1985) was an Austro-Hungarian-British classical scholar, a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.

Early life
Bolgar was born in London on 2 June 1913, the son of Ernest Joseph Bolgar (born Ernst Johann von Brokl), an Austro-Hungarian of Sudeten-German origin who changed his name after being cheated out of an inheritance. Bolgar would later say that but for this mischance of his father’s he might have become a pro-Nazi landowner in Moravia and been killed by the Russians in 1945.

At the time of his birth, his father had a job at the Austro-Hungarian consulate in London, but when Bolgar was between the ages of one and eleven years he was taken to live in Hungary, Germany and France, where he had his early education.

In 1925, his father returned to London, and he was sent to the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Holland Park. From there he won a classical scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, to enter the college in 1932.

In 1939, Bolgar graduated PhD and was awarded a Fellowship at King's.

Second World War
When the Second World War broke out in October 1939, Bolgar’s father was Second Secretary at the Hungarian Embassy, and the Kingdom of Hungary was one of the Axis powers. He was allowed to stay in England to look after the building, but was nevertheless an enemy alien.

Bolgar, born in England, applied to join the British Army, but due to the status of his father he could not be commissioned. He was able to join the Suffolk Regiment as an enlisted man, and after two years was transferred to the Army Educational Corps. For eighteen months he was posted to Ranchi in the Bihar Province of British India, in command of an educational centre which suffered from many sudden transfers of its instructors. He returned to civilian life in 1946.

Academic career
After returning from India, Bolgar was a research Fellow at King's until he had developed the work for his thesis into a book, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (1954). This deals with a process lasting a thousand years and includes appendices which list the Greek manuscripts in Italy during the fifteenth century and the translations from Greek and Roman classical authors before 1600. The work has been called “an astonishingly perceptive assessment for a young man” and “an encyclopedic account of the transmission of classical literature from late antiquity through the end of the Renaissance”.

From 1954 to 1956, Bolgar was at the University of Durham, based in Newcastle, as a research fellow in education. He then returned to King’s as a fellow and college lecturer in Modern Languages. In 1958 he became Director of Studies and Supervisor in French. He was also appointed as a governor of the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges of the Impington Village College and the Bottisham Village College.

His gained a greater international reputation by his contributions to the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and by his editing of the proceedings of two symposia on “Classical Influences on European Culture” which he organized with L.P. Wilkinson. The first, in 1969, covered the period from 500 to 1500; the second, in 1974, that from 1500 to 1700.

Bolgar’s lectures, sponsored by three faculties, Classical Studies, Modern Languages, and English, were stimulating, but until 1973 were mostly supported by King’s College, when the University created an ad hominem Readership for him.

Personal life
In the summer of 1943, at Norwich, Bolgar married Elizabeth Rowley or Adcock. They had two daughters and a son and lived in the villages of Girton and Great Wilbraham, both near Cambridge, where Bolgar developed an interest in local history as a recreation.

Bolgar died at Great Wilbraham in June 1985, leaving an estate valued at £34,691.

Selected publications

 * R. R. Bolgar, “Rabelais's Edition of the "Aphorisms" of Hippocrates” in Modern Language Review 1940
 * R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries: from the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1954)
 * R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences on European Culture, A.D. 500-1500
 * R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences on European Culture, A.D. 1500-1700 (1976)
 * R. R. Bolgar, ed., ''Classical Influences on Western Thought, A.D. 1650-1870: proceedings of an international conference held at King's College, Cambridge, March 1977 (Cambridge University Press, 1979)
 * R. R. Bolgar, “The Near-Christian” in Theology, Vol. 70, Issue 565 (July 1967) https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X6707056502
 * R. R. Bolgar, “Humanist education and its contribution to the Renaissance” in The Changing Curriculum (Routledge, 1971) 9780203707135