William Radcliffe

William Radcliffe was an English angler and classical scholar, educated at Balliol College, Oxford, who devoted his later years to the history of fishing in the ancient world. His Fishing from the Earliest Times, published in 1921 and written, he said, between war work and illness, examines what Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Hebrew and Chinese sources say about rods, lines, flies and fish, and defends Aristotle as the first reader of fish scales. It was dedicated to his fishing hosts on five continents and remains the standard account of its subject.