Maurice W.M. Pope (1926-2019) was educated in England at Sherborne School and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He taught classics for two decades at the University of Cape Town in South Africa before resigning his professorship and leaving the country in 1969 in protest at apartheid in academia. He then researched, taught and wrote in Oxford, Canada and the United States.

Pope was a leading expert of his time in the ancient Cretan script Minoan Linear A. His critically acclaimed 1975 book The Story of Decipherment has been translated into several languages and remains in print with a 1999 update on the decrypting of the Maya script. Other books and publications dealt with teaching Latin, daily life and politics in ancient Greece, the Dutch Renaissance philosopher Erasmus, Shakespeare's medical imagination and expertise in falconry, and ground-breaking early work on juries and the principles of random selection.