When asked to comment on his intellectual formation, Brown has also indicated that he completed his public schooling a year early, returning to Ireland (as he had done for school holidays) in 1952, the year he turned 17. It was then in Dublin that he read Mikhail Rostovtzeff's "The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire" (1926), which he borrowed from the lending library of the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge. The academic year 1952–3 was a "hiatus" for Brown, between school and university, during which he learned to type at a secretarial school, and received German lessons from an academic at Trinity College Dublin who had been a refugee from Nazi Germany.