Born in Gloucestershire into a family with strong engineering connections (his father was director of a shipbuilding firm in Newcastle-upon-Tyne), Browne attended Eton and graduated from Cambridge in the Natural Sciences in 1882, qualifying as a practitioner of medicine in 1887. In between, he travelled briefly to Istanbul (1883) and took the Indian languages tripos at Cambridge in 1884. His background of wealth and liberal orientations gave him scope to follow a career in Oriental Studies rather than medicine, and adopt radical postures on the East. Successively the Turks and then the Iranians became objects of his ardour, and he actively promoted their cultural and political causes. He developed a particular rapport with Iranians after his visit to Iran in 1887–8; though this would be his only visit it featured in one of the best travel works of the nineteenth century, A Year Amongst the Persians, which appeared in 1893. Browne was made Sir Thomas Adam's Professor of Arabic in 1902 and spent the rest of his life as a Cambridge don. However, his bitter criticism of the foreign policy of the Liberal Government, especially its position on the Iranian constitutional revolution between 1906 and 1911, harmed his reputation among the political establishment. Independent means and a remarkable grasp of Oriental languages made Browne a formidable adversary. A love for Persian language and culture strongly informs A Year Amongst the Persians, in spite of its being the work of a young man.