  Hermann Bondi's 1952 paper "On spherically symmetrical accretion" is
recognized as one of the foundations of accretion theory. Although Bondi later
remarked that it was "not much more than an examination exercise", his
mathematical analysis of spherical accretion on to a point mass has found broad
use across fields of astrophysics that were embryonic or non-existent at the
time of the paper's publication. In this non-technical review, I describe the
motivations for Bondi's work, and briefly discuss some of the applications of
Bondi accretion in high energy astrophysics, galaxy formation, and star
formation.
