Now living in County Wexford, Ireland, and in his 70s, N M Gwynne was formerly a successful businessman in London and Australia. On retirement in the 1980s, he gradually took up teaching, at first privately. He soon found that he had a clear vocation for teaching, and that his traditional methods, universal up to the 1960s and refined and perfected century after century up till then, had suddenly become all but unique because of the revolution in teaching that had taken place worldwide at around that time. Subjects he has been teaching – in classrooms, in lecture halls, and nowadays mostly privately – include English, Latin, Greek, French, German, mathematics, history, classical philosophy, natural medicine, the elements of music, and "How to start up and run your own business”. Now with an international word-of-mouth reputation, Mr Gwynne has been flown around the world in order to teach his pupils. And thanks to the internet and Skype, he has sometimes found himself, at different times in a single day, teaching children and adults as far apart as in India, in Europe and in western USA.