Brian, elder brother of Conor Farrington, the Irish actor, playwright and broadcaster, was born in Dublin in 1925 of distinguished and unusual parents. Most of his life has been spent as an ex-pat Irishman in France (16 years) and Scotland, with brief interludes in places like Manchester and Hungary. His memoir: A Rich Soup. with additional material the title is explained in the last sentence - is far from being the sort of autobiography made up of sentences that should only figure in Xmas letters to neglected cousins (Roy Hattersley). Rather is it a concatenation of anecdotes, descriptions, stories and ideas, some moving, some hilariously funny, being by-products of a long and on the whole enjoyable life spent exploiting an awkwardly heterogeneous set of talents and fitting them into a teacher s career. Pyrenean and Alpine mountains, Irish caverns, life in a left-wing commune in Paris figure in the book. Also, entertainingly described, are Paris in the nineteen fifties, the experience of being on the jury for a French doctorate in Applied Linguistics, orating from a soap-box, and travelling the length and breadth of the winter Highlands as an examiner in French. A pioneer in the use of computers for language learning, Brian ended up running the Language Centre of Aberdeen University. He has also published two collections of poetry one with Dolmen in Dublin and a short book on W B Yeats, as well as designing and programming several innovative software packages