Tawdry deal tarnished a couple’s wedding — and a nation’s leader

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness — And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

THAT was love in those days. Thou beside me singing in the wilderness. At least it was in the days of Omar Khayyam, a Persian mathematician and poet of the 12th century.

When we were in school, we learned nothing of his maths (Commentaries on the difficult postulates of Euclid's book was just one of the tomes we could have enjoyed, or indeed his revolutionary Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra). Alas, it was only the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to which we were ever introduced or at least the famous translation by Edward Fitzgerald.