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Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 60 Easter 2010
In this issue:
In defence of Hall The first 100 days of coalition An idler’s idyll Subterranean secrets Alison Richard: first lady Summer reading
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Contents
CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 60 Easter Term 2010
12
Regulars Letters Don’s diary Update Diary Noticeboard My room, your room The best... History of a friendship
02 03 04 08 11
Take three 17 Secret Cambridge 18
Review University Matters 12 Summer books 13 Right to reply Sport 14 Prize crossword
39 40 45 47 48
Features An idler’s idyll
20
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Tom Hodgkinson explains why there’s nowhere he’d rather be than punting on the Cam.
One for Hall
24
Commensality – sharing a table – is a tradition worth fighting for argues Michael Bywater.
First lady
47 CAM is published three times a year, in the Lent, Easter and Michaelmas terms and is sent free to Cambridge alumni. It is available to non-alumni on subscription. For further information contact the Alumni Office. The opinions expressed in CAM are those of the contributors and are not necessarily those of the University of Cambridge. Cover photograph: Jesus College shelter (page 18). Photograph by Steve Bond. Copyright © 2010
Editor Mira Katbamna Managing Editor Morven Knowles Design Smith www.smithltd.co.uk Print Pindar Publisher The University of Cambridge Development Office 1 Quayside Bridge Street Cambridge CB5 8AB Tel +44 (0)1223 332 288
Advertising enquiries Tel +44 (0)20 7520 9474 landmark@lps.co.uk
Vice-Chancellor Professor Alison Richard explains just why alumni are so crucial to the future of Cambridge.
This sporting life
32
Robert Hudson explores how – and why – sport informs and reflects a sense of national identity.
Editorial enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760155 cam.editor@admin.cam.ac.uk Alumni enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760150 alumni@admin.cam.ac.uk www.alumni.cam.ac.uk www.facebook.com/ cambridgealumni www.twitter.com/CARO1209
28
A global network This publication contains paper manufactured by Chain-of-Custody certified suppliers operating within internationally recognised environmental standards in order to ensure sustainable sourcing and production.
36
Across the world, Cambridge alumni groups are forming for fun, work and philanthropy.
Services offered by advertisers are not specifically endorsed by the editor or the University of Cambridge. The publisher reserves the right to decline or withdraw advertisements.
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EDITOR’S LETTER
Your letters
Lazy summer days
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elcome to the Easter issue of CAM. Summer seems to come early in Cambridge. With most exams finished by the start of June, the intense and studious silence erupts into picnics, parties, and of course punting. On page 20, the Idler’s editor, Tom Hodgkinson (Jesus 1986), explains why there’s nowhere he’d rather be than messing about on the river. Hodgkinson points out that an essential part of punting equipment is the book (ideally a novel, but non-fiction is also acceptable). But what to choose? Most of us will temper our summer reading ambitions by the weight of our suitcases, but even those in possession of an e-reader must still make judicious choices about exactly which books to read on arrival. Whether your tastes run to the serious or frivolous, our panel of alumni and academics has recommendations to delight every bibliophile on page 40. After the inevitable post-exam indulgence (whether book-based or otherwise), the end of term – especially your final term – can be tinged with a slight sadness: as you read this, over 3500 of CAM’s newest readers are trooping up King’s Parade, college by college, to receive their degrees at Senate House, and then going down for the last time. This year, we also say goodbye to a woman who has had a tremendous impact on Cambridge life: Vice-Chancellor Professor Alison Richard. On page 28 she talks about what it has been like leading Cambridge over the past seven years. Lastly, our feature about polar exploration (CAM 59) sparked lively discussion. On page 45, Professor Julian Dowdeswell defends Scott’s legacy. As ever, we welcome your letters and emails: please do join the debate.
Mira Katbamna (Caius 1995)
02 CAM 60
Illustrated memories I read the account of Professor Richard Evans’ encounter with Puck of Pook’s Hill (CAM 59) with a powerful sense of déjà vu. At the same age – and even longer ago – I too was entranced, and images from those stories still recur. Professor Evans did not mention the illustrations by H.R. Millar, which I find I recall in greater detail than Kipling’s text. Entrancing – if not always archaeologically accurate – Millar’s illustrations shaped one’s imagining of the story then, and remain wonderfully atmospheric period pieces. Peter Salway (Sidney 1951) Polar exploration The fascination with Scott and his place in the British national pantheon of heroes is easy to understand. Scott the amateur was typical of those who had, without a thought for their personal safety or comfort, explored, acquired and then administered the greatest empire the world had ever known. When things went well, which was the case most of the time, they were hailed as great men. In a few cases they ‘bit off more than they could chew’ and became ‘tragic heroes’ – Scott is one and Gordon of Khartoum another very similar. However they rightly remain national heroes and symptomatic of era when the concept of ‘duty’ meant that one would take risks for Queen/King and Empire which would not be accepted nowadays. I have a feeling that these ‘tragic heroes’ will be remembered long after the ‘professionals’ have been forgotten! Michael Waters (Downing 1969) Finding a balance Congratulations on by far the most interesting issue of CAM that I can remember. Writing for
‘War is heaven and hell. After three major European campaigns, Lent Term at Cambridge was truly heaven’
alumni seems to me to require a balance between the past and the future, avoiding an overdependence on nostalgia and filling pages with amazing, but often incomprehensible, stories on Cambridge-based developments in science and technology. I think you have got this balance absolutely right. Brian Bartlett (Christ’s 1952)
Friendly invaders Your article on Bull College brought back happy memories. I was touch judge at the RugbyAtomic Football match at Grange Road, when Lady Bragg “kicked the game off”. Many years later, I was told by her daughter that Lady Bragg had spent hours in her garden perfecting her kick. My other memory is of the joint debate at Pembroke. My memory is that the motion – “The Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth Rock,
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We are always delighted to receive your letters and emails. Email CAM at cam.editor@admin.cam.ac.uk or write to us at CAM, Cambridge Alumni Relations Office, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB. Please mark your letter ‘For Publication’. Letters may be edited for length. Read more CAM letters at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam/letters
but in the opinion of this House, it would have been better if Plymouth Rock had landed on the Pilgrim Fathers” – was proposed by a G.I., but I fear that I cannot recall the outcome of the debate. Michael Atkins (Pembroke 1944) I remember Bill Gandall of Bull College. He moved into Cambridge politics and I recall the row with Bertrand Russell. (I remember seeing Bertrand Russell crossing Trinity Street in his dressing gown because bathrooms were closed to save fuel.) Bill Gandall had been in the Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigade and said that he had a huge dossier that followed him round in the American Army. He represents an area of US life which gets totally forgotten these days. Professor Alan Mackay (Trinity 1947) War is heaven and hell. After participating in three major European campaigns, including the Battle of the Bulge as a combat infantryman, where I experienced the hell of war and chaos of battle, Lent Term at Cambridge was truly heaven. In the picture montage in CAM, I am standing in the centre of the five men on the lower right side of the page, pants bloused in my boots. Arnold R Baum (Bull College)
Cruciverbalist crisis May I please appeal for a way of submitting crossword solutions electronically (or even better, of receiving the puzzle electronically)? I live abroad and by the time the magazine reaches me I am usually perilously close to the submission date. Peter Casey (Trinity 1966) We’re happy to oblige. Keen cruciverbalists can download the crossword at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam. Please email the completed document to cam.editor@admin.cam.ac.uk.
Don’s Diary Professor Athene Donald, FRS, is Professor of Experimental Physics and a specialist in soft matter physics. In 2009 she became the L'Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science Laureate for Europe.
A
new term, a new lecture course. It’s always daunting, particularly with 350 keen first years waiting for pearls of wisdom. So it was this term, as I delivered the revamped Waves and Quantum Waves course to our first year NatSci students. Twelve lectures later, I have a much better idea of where things have gone right – and wrong. Realising how easy it is to create Powerpoint slides with the basics right, but the boring detail just slightly wrong, is depressing. And first years don’t easily forgive the trivial typo – as the questionnaires duly revealed at the end of the course. But they do like demonstrations, so it was heartening to get a round of applause for the first serious one I attempted: establishing a resonance on a metal plate by bowing it. The sound is very satisfying when one gets it right, particularly as it can so easily not go to plan.
growing in activity, both within Cambridge (for example, the Physics of Medicine initiative of which I was the first Director until the end of 2009) and outside. As a relatively new field, its identity is still developing. I have come to it from a background in polymer physics, initially working on familiar synthetic polymers such as polythene and polystyrene, then moving through food polymers such as starch and cellulose and onto proteins and now, increasingly, cells.
The lecture course was notable for two further reasons. A severe chest infection made getting to the lecture theatre on time a challenge – a problem exacerbated by the slow demise of my 12-year-old bicycle. Thereafter I had to borrow my daughter’s enormously heavy bicycle, also a strain on the lungs, until I could obtain my new and much lighter bicycle through the University’s Cycle-to-Work scheme.
From a physics perspective, this field is not yet fully understood or accepted by the community. As chair of the Institute of Physics’ Biological Physics group, set up three years ago, I have been in dialogue with the main funders of physics research, the EPSRC, to get them to engage more fully with the community. Following our discussions, the remit of the physics panel has been extended to include biological physics. This may seem trivial, but we believe it will lead to slow cultural change in how the field is viewed by our peers.
More positively, this term I discovered,to my enormous surprise, that Glamour magazine had awarded me the number one spot in the science and technology category in their list of the UK’s 30 most ‘powerful’ women. This brief achievement of Z-list celebrity impressed my daughter (her university flatmates stumbled upon a photograph of her mother). I realised my first years had picked up on the article when a young male student came up to me at the end of one lecture, clutching his (or possibly his girlfriend’s) copy of the magazine, asking for my autograph. Getting science into the magazine was a real plus, but I was disappointed they did not contact me for a quote. Since the magazine’s readership is young women in the 18- to 35-year-old category it would have been a great opportunity to say why girls can and should think about careers in science. My research lies largely at the interface of physics with biology. This is an area that is rapidly
Working in a new area is always exciting, particularly as the field is wide open. My work on how proteins stick together into aggregates could feed into ideas underpinning diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. Although I would emphasise that ‘could’, I have just co-authored a paper, with researchers from Keele, which has been accepted by the Journal of Alzheimer’s Research.
Problems remain, of course. Our research tends to lie at the junction between two research councils; all too often grant applications can fall between the cracks. Watching a grant shunted from the EPSRC (because it was too biological) to the BBSRC, where it failed for not being biological enough, forcibly underlined the issue for me. Teaching, too, can be affected, although the Cavendish has a good track record in the area. In this, the Institute of Physics is taking a lead and I and others, including my colleague Dr Pietro Cicuta, are working with the Institute to produce modules that departments who lack staff in the field can adapt to fit into their own teaching. I was pleased to sneak a little biological physics into my own new first year course: I hope that for some students it may just spark an excitement about interdisciplinary work. www.pom.cam.ac.uk CAM 60 03
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UPDATE EASTER TERM Photos: Left: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images. Below:Warren Little/Getty Images
800th CAMPAIGN
Fundraising first for Cambridge The University of Cambridge has become the first university outside the United States to raise £1 billion in a fundraising campaign. The total raised for the University and Colleges by the 800th Anniversary Campaign has just surpassed £1 billion, two years ahead of schedule. The Campaign was launched publicly in autumn 2005. So far, an average of 20,000 alumni a year have given to the Campaign and many of these had never made a gift to Cambridge before. Twenty-six per cent of contactable alumni have made at least one gift to their College or to the University during the Campaign, with many signing up to make regular donations. In acknowledging this remarkable achievement, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alison Richard, said “Cambridge is consistently ranked among the top handful of universities in the world yet our endowment income is dwarfed by our peers in the United States where a culture of alumni giving is more established. We must continue to invest in students, staff and facilities, in order to sustain our international pre-eminence against better funded competitors.” Money raised by the University and the 31 Colleges in this Campaign has increased the number and level of bursaries and scholarships available to students, enhanced initiatives to encourage applications to Cambridge, funded new buildings for research, teaching and student accommodation, endowed professorships and teaching posts, attracted outstanding new academic staff and enriched the University’s heritage collections. The Campaign, currently projected to end in 2012, will continue – in order to provide the resources and diversity of income that are key to remaining amongst the world’s best. www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/campaign
FAREWELL
Head of the river Members of the Women’s Boat Club were sad to say goodbye this term to chief coach Roger Silk. A tireless mentor, boatman, trailer driver and inspiration for generations of Cambridge athletes, Silk coached the women’s crews for over 20 years. 04 CAM 60
SPORT
Light Blues triumphant The Light Blues defied pre-race odds to triumph in the 156th Boat Race in one of the most thrilling races in recent years. A day of great excitement was marked by a double celebration, as the reserve boat, Goldie, also beat Oxford’s Isis. Although Oxford won the toss and took the lead from the start, the experienced Cambridge crew refused to give up and never let Oxford establish a clear boat-length’s advantage. By Barnes Bridge, Cambridge had a three-quarter-length lead. Oxford made one last desperate push to claw back the lead but Cambridge responded, crossing the finish line of the four-and-a-half-mile course one and a third lengths ahead. Results at Henley, where the men’s lightweight crew and the women’s three boats (Blue, Blondie and Lightweight) race, were more mixed. The women’s boats were beaten by Oxford, but the men’s lightweight crew celebrated a magnificent win. To find out more about Cambridge boat clubs visit www.cubc.org.uk and www.cuwbc.org.
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UPDATE EASTER TERM
Cambridge woman youngest to North Pole A Trinity College graduate has become the first British woman and the youngest female ever to walk to the geographic North Pole unsupported. Amelia Russell, aged 27, and Dan Darley, also a Trinity graduate, reached their icy destination at the end of April, 12 hours ahead of schedule. They had spent 58 days walking the 500 miles across the ice from Ward Hunt Island in northern Canada.
EVENTS
LIBRARIES & MUSEUMS
Anglo-Saxon treasures online
F
Other jewels include the Corpus Glossary (MS 144), the celebrated 9th-century dictionary, which includes definitions of well over 2,000 words in Anglo-Saxon, including ones still recognisable today, such as herring and hazel. It remains one of the most important surviving records for the origins of the English language. The online project, funded by almost $6m from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will allow scholars, researchers and anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon, later medieval and Reformation history, theology and literature, to gain almost complete access to one of the world’s most important collections.
Find out whether the West is losing its power, what makes a good parent and whether you’d make a better fist of running the economy at the University’s annual Festival of Ideas. Now in its third year, the hugely popular – and mostly free – festival, which runs from 20 to 31 October, returns with big ideas from big brains. Over 10 days, Cambridge will host debates, lectures and talks, opening department doors to students, alumni and the public and celebrating the arts, humanities and social sciences. Highlights of the 2010 Festival include Professor Linda Colley speaking on when and why the constitution became ‘unwritten’, a tour of criminal Cambridge, and a talk by bestselling children’s author Jacqueline Wilson. But the biggest day of the Festival promises to be Family Day (23 October), when intellectuals of all ages will be invited to take part in events across Cambridge that organisers hope will stimulate and surprise. Visit www.admin.cam.ac.uk/whatson/ideasfestival for more information. Jacqueline Wilson
To view the online library visit: http://parkerweb. stanford.edu.
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The Times
orget rooting about in dusty archives: ancient and medieval manuscripts are no longer the preserve of professional scholars. This term, one of the most important collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts – the Parker Library, entrusted to Corpus in 1574 – went online. The collection holds more than 550 manuscripts, including the 9th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (the earliest history written in English), monastic books from the early Dark Ages, letters from Anne Boleyn and Martin Luther – and the bill for burning Cranmer in 1556. One particular treasure, however, is the 6th-century St Augustine Gospels, as Donnelley Fellow, Christopher de Hamel, explains. “It is the oldest illustrated Latin Gospel Book in existence. It has been in England longer than any other book. The Archbishops of Canterbury still take their oath of office on it. As a symbol of religion, history and literacy, it is one of the most evocative books in Christendom.”
Festival of Ideas 2010
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UPDATE EASTER TERM
Pilkington Prizes Dr Joachim Whaley and Dr Hallvard Lillehammer (Arts and Humanities), Dr Julia Davies and Dr Helen Mott (Biological Sciences), Dr John Firth and Dr Mark Lillicrap (Clinical Medicine), Dr Mark Elliott and Professor Simon Schaffer (Humanities and Social Sciences), Dr Richard Harrison and Dr Rob Wallach (Physical Sciences) and Dr Simon Moore and Dr Simon Guest (Technology) have all been awarded Pilkington Prizes for teaching excellence.
Lee Woodgate
FAREWELL
Jenny Zinovieff retires Jenny Zinovieff, who began the alumni relations programme at Cambridge 19 years ago, retires this term. A pioneer in the development of alumni relations programmes at a time when they were not common at UK institutions, Jenny went on to introduce many of the principal components of current alumni relations activity at Cambridge, including the CAMCard, the hugely successful alumni travel programme, the Alumni Worldwide Directory and the e-bulletin. She was one of the key members of the team that established Alumni Weekend, and with editor Peter Richards, successfully managed CAM for over 10 years. In 2008 Jenny was seconded to the 800th Anniversary team, and played a vital part in making the celebrations a huge success. Over the years, Jenny has helped hundreds – if not thousands – of alumni to keep in touch with the University. She is known by colleagues and alumni alike as a mine of ideas, information and expertise and her sparkiness and wit will be greatly missed by the CARO team and the University.
COLLEGES
Homerton becomes full Cambridge College Economic crisis conference in Cambridge Two hundred of the world’s most distinguished economists, academics and thought leaders congregated at King’s College, in April to discuss the future of the economic profession at the same location where Keynes pondered and debated economic theory over 70 years ago. Conversations focused on the Greek debt crisis, the current state of the central bank, and strategies for economic reform worldwide. Key speakers included Dominique Strauss-Kahn (managing director of the IMF), Adair Turner (chairman of the Financial Services Authority), Joseph Stiglitz (professor at Columbia University and Nobel Laureate), and Simon Johnson (professor at MIT and former Chief Economist of the IMF). Broadcast live by the Judge Business School and sponsored by the George Soros Foundation, the conference marked the launch of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Visit www.ineteconomics.org or www.jbs.cam.ac.uk for more information.
Homerton College has officially become the University of Cambridge’s newest selfgoverning full College. On Friday 12 March, Sir David Harrison, the Chairman of the Homerton Board of Trustees, formally handed the Royal Charter to the Principal and Fellows of the College. Homerton is by no means a ‘new’ College. It was established in the late 17th century in east London, moving to Cambridge in 1894. Since 2001, Homerton has diversified. The College has 600 undergraduate members studying Cambridge Triposes, and 500 postgraduates, the majority of whom take the PGCE, maintaining the College’s role at the forefront of teacher training. CAM 60 07
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DIARY SUMMER/ AUTUMN Alamy
Ella Woolner
Alex Corr
EVENTS
Alumni Weekend Friday 24 – Sunday 26 September. Various locations in Cambridge.
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Tim Rawle
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HE FIRST Alumni Weekend, almost 20 years ago, was attended by just 230 people, and while the style of the event has hardly changed (ambling around Cambridge never goes out of fashion) its scale certainly has. This year, almost 1200 guests are expected. They will find Cambridge transformed, as alumni from around the world attend lectures, tours and events (and indulge in a little punting, lunching and reminiscing). The weekend is a unique opportunity to hear and meet academics at the forefront of Cambridge thinking, to go ‘behind the scenes’ at the University and Colleges, to catch up with old friends - and meet new ones. From Dame Fiona Reynolds (Newnham 1976), Director of the National Trust, discussing ‘Nature in the 21st Century’ in her keynote speech on Saturday 25 September
to a discussion of Bill Sykes and the Beano at the Institute of Criminology, this year’s lecture programme is full of treats and surprises. Alumni will be able to discover whether other animals think about the future and what the future holds for social mobility in modern Britain, journey around the rings of Saturn and the science of personality or get an insider’s introduction to particle
physics at the Hadron Collider. Whether you visit the Persian manuscripts held at the Fitzwilliam, see the normally restricted treasures of the University’s Herbarium or attend one of the many College garden tours, you’ll be seeing a side of Cambridge few people encounter. Alternatively, if you fancy exercising your vocal chords, join the scratch choir at ‘Come and Sing’, back by popular demand. Participants will join conductor Stephen Cleobury, Director of Music at King’s College, choral soloists and members of the CUMS choir to sing Brahms’ Requiem. With the University hosting almost 150 events and Colleges adding to this number with their own activities, whether you come on your own or bring family, friends or colleagues, the Alumni Weekend offers something for all ages and interests. You can choose to attend the lecture programme on Saturday, or for the whole three-day event – but either way we recommend that you book early as numbers for certain events are limited. Visit www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/weekend to find out what’s on and where, or phone to request a brochure.
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Online booking Our new online booking service at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk is the fastest and most efficient way to book. There is no additional fee and your place will be confirmed as soon as your transaction is complete. If you prefer to book by post or email, don’t forget to include your (and your guests’) full name, College, matriculation date and membership number (where applicable). We only need contact details for the lead booker. Please be aware that all events are subject to change.
DIARY SUMMER/AUTUMN
In Churchill’s Footsteps Saturday 30 April 2011, London
Imperial War Museum
EVENTS
EVENTS
Festive networking drinks Tuesday 7 December, 7.30–9.30pm, London
Sir Paul Judge (Trinity 1968) and members of the University of Cambridge Alumni Advisory Board warmly invite all alumni for an evening of festive networking, with drinks and canapés. This event will take place in Sir Paul’s spectacular riverside apartment, overlooking the Thames, with views only rivalled by the London Eye. This is a fabulous opportunity for alumni to meet members of the Board and network in style. With the Cambridge alumni community representative of the full spectrum of business sectors, job roles and organisations, we hope that you can join Sir Paul and other members of the Alumni Board as they host this special occasion in London. This event is open to all alumni and their guests. Tickets cost £35 per person and pre-booking is essential.
“The Cabinet War Rooms operated round the clock from the beginning of the war in 1939 to its end in August 1945.” Alumni and their guests will be able to attend lectures by Professor Christopher Andrew, MI5’s official historian, and military historian Professor Richard Holmes. There will also be an opportunity to explore the Churchill War Rooms, offering an unparalleled opportunity to see at close quarters where Winston Churchill, his War Cabinet and chiefs of staff met and worked during the second world war. Tickets cost £65 per person and include a buffet lunch and refreshments. Pre-booking is essential.
W
alk in Churchill’s footsteps along the dimly lit, atmospheric corridors of the Cabinet War Rooms, where in 1940, shortly after assuming the office of Prime Minister, Winston Churchill stood and declared, “This is a room from which I will direct the war.”
Contact CARO: www.alumni.cam.ac.uk alumni@admin.cam.ac.uk Telephone: +44 (0)1223 332288 Morten Morland
Cambridge Alumni Relations Office (CARO) University of Cambridge 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB. CAM 60 09
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Noticeboard
ALUMNI GROUPS
Alumni worldwide directory Looking to meet new friends, network or attend interesting events in your local area? Find your local alumni group in the Alumni Worldwide Directory at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/networks. And if you live outside the UK you’ll find a copy of the Directory in this issue of CAM.
CAM survey Do you devour CAM cover to cover, dip in now and again or read it on the train? Whichever it is, we’d like to know more about what you think about CAM, and so we are asking a cross-section of readers to complete an online readership survey. Thank you to all those who take part; we plan to share some of the findings with you later in the year.
CAMCard discounts If you are returning to Cambridge over the summer, remember to bring your CAMCard! As well as instantly identifying you as a member of the University, giving you free access to all colleges, the CAMCard also entitles you to special rates and discounts at Heffers, the CUP bookshop, Cambridge Wine Merchants, Scudamore’s and selected local restaurants and hotels. To find out more or to request a CAMCard visit: www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits.
Cambridge Gifts Now Available Treat yourself with a gift from our exclusive new range of alumni merchandise. These include a University of Cambridge leather travel set (available in black or light blue), a sports bag, telescopic umbrella and mugs featuring the University crest and motto. All these items are available from our new online shop www.camalumni.co.uk.
New alumni groups There are over 370 volunteer-led alumni groups in 96 countries in the world, and this term new groups have been set up everywhere from Sudan to Manchester. To read more about what alumni groups get up to, turn to page 36. Costa Rica: Michael Cannon (Corpus 1960) mcstjcannon@hotmail.com Estonia: Dr Nigel James (Queens’ 1960) nigeljames67@yahoo.com Latvia: Ieva Berzina-Andersone (Trinity Hall 2007) ieva.berzina-andersone@cantab.net Manchester: Dr Peter Swift (Churchill 1993) prswift7@googlemail.com Sudan: Dr Ayham Ammora (Trinity 1997) ayham.ammora@googlemail.com Please contact Jan Pudney (jt219@cam.ac.uk) if you’d like to help revive a group in Afghanistan, Queensland Australia, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia or Vietnam. Lost alumni Rosemary Brown (Homerton 1977) Jeremy Dronfield (Darwin 1991) Mark Lowe (King’s 1954) (Richard) Andrew Simpson (Caius 1980) If you know any of these alumni, please ask them to contact the Alumni Relations Office. In addition an alumni reunion is planned for those who received their MB BCh from the School of Clinical Medicine in 1990, to mark 20 years since qualifying. A list of those for whom contact details are still sought can be found at: www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/contact/lost Keep us updated If your copy of CAM is still forwarded from your last address (or, indeed, your parents’) you can update your details online at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk.
Celebrating a milestone event in 2010? Mark the occasion with an Onoto fountain pen Whether you’re celebrating graduation, a new job, a marriage or retirement, make your mark with a 2010 fountain pen from Onoto. Based on the 800th Anniversary design that proved so popular last year, the 2010 pen is engraved with the words ‘University of Cambridge 2010’ around the cap and is available in gold plated sterling silver, sterling silver and black acrylic. Pens can be personalised with a name or initials and College crest. Visit www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/merchan dise for more information.
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MY ROOM, YOUR ROOM M1,GREAT COURT, TRINITY
Words Leigh Brauman Photographs David Yeo Edward Stourton (Trinity 1976) is a BBC broadcaster, presenter of Radio 4’s Sunday programme and formerly a presenter of the Today programme. He is a former president of the Cambridge Union Society.
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Ho-On To is a fourth year engineering student. Although he has been knuckling down to exams (he hopes to do a PhD next year), Ho-On points out that it’s not so bad for engineers – job offers and applications have been made on the basis of last year’s results.
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O-ON TO’s ground floor Trinity set contains a mystery. Exquisitely engraved into the glass in the central window looking onto Great Court is a poem. “I’ve always wondered about it,” explains Ho-On. “My mates pointed it out and we’ve talked about it quite a lot. In fact, the other day I overheard two people standing outside my window discussing it.” The fifteenth-century poem, known variously as Bridal Morning and elsewhere as The Lily and the Rose is anonymous. The first lines, “The maidens came/ When I was in my mother’s bower” will be familiar to musicians and English students alike, but the engraving itself leaves few clues. The artist could have lived 300 years ago, or three years ago – but much to Ho-On’s delight, Edward Stourton, whose room this was in 1978, can date the engraving precisely. “It was done by my then girlfriend, Margaret McEwen. It was a poem I was studying – she just tapped away over the course of a couple of weekends,” Edward explains. “The odd thing, in retrospect, is that nobody seemed to mind. And that it’s still here. It did occur to me that I might get a knock on the door from the porter at some stage, but I don’t remember being worried about
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Charlie Troman
it. I had window boxes with roses in them and nobody seemed much bothered by that either!” As for the rest of M1, Edward thinks it looks much the same – almost. “It was much more old-fashioned when I was here. The sofa was big and old and deep and I used to work on it, or rather, read novels on it,” he says. “But it was a fun room to have because people did just pop in. I always had a bottle of College sherry on the go just in case.” The introduction of central heating is one major change. “What I remember most of all about this room is being cold, unbelievably cold,” Edward says. “Some nights were so bad I slept with two overcoats on.” Do today’s students work harder than their 1970s predecessors? “I think it’s quite intense nowadays,” Ho-On says. “Even if you want to get a 2.1 you still have to work really hard.” Edward agrees. “My son read English at Corpus and he gave up drinking during Finals – which none of us did. We were very lucky in that way, I suppose.” Not that twenty-first century undergraduate life is dull. Indeed, Ho-On, a former captain of the University Swimming Club and a swimming Blue has a thrillseeking hobby that very much appeals to Edward. “This year I’ve been doing Formula One racing – we spend the year designing and building the cars and race them against other university teams in the summer.” Ho-On wants to know whether Edward was a diligent student. “I didn’t get into bad trouble,” he says. “I did do quite a lot of partying and even what I am ashamed to say you might today call binge drinking.” Nonetheless, Edward still has exam nightmares alongside the broadcasting ones – which prompts Ho-On to wonder aloud whether Edward has ever interviewed contemporaries on the radio and thought, ‘I remember when you…’. “I have. I probably shouldn’t say who though!” he says. “I still come across people I knew then. Alastair Campbell was a contemporary, although he wasn’t at Trinity and funnily enough, back then, no one thought he would go on to do the things he has. Charles Moore and Oliver Letwin had a set in Great Court, known as the young fogies cell. It was just before Thatcherism and people used to drop in for a little right-wing politics.” As to his fondest memory of M1, there’s no competition: “The view. It hasn’t changed for 400 years, but look out at night or in the early morning it is always a little bit different,” Edward says. “That, and the sound of plashing water from the fountain.”
THE BEST... STATUE IN CAMBRIDGE Hugo Gye is reading Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Trinity
Lazy. Drunken. Hedonistic. Lord Byron was hardly the model student. So it has always been a surprise to me to find a statue of the archetypal enfant terrible dominating Trinity’s Wren Library. The library, with its classical perfection and austerity, is not the sort of place one naturally associates with such a dissolute figure. After all, it houses an important collection of manuscripts and rare books and in keeping with this academic reputation the room is flanked with busts of fellows of Trinity and great literary figures. But when I visit, to borrow a book or to study, it is the huge statue of Byron that most draws my eye. The statue is beautiful, a marble vision conveying Byron’s earthy charm (he is even holding a copy of the scandalous Childe Harold). Yet this is not the whole story. The sculptor, Thorvaldsen, has given the poet an ethereal gaze: this is a Byron not quite of this world. Moreover, the story behind it is fascinating: the statue was commissioned for Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, but rejected due to the poet’s reputation. Trinity took pity on its alumnus, accepted the statue, and Byron has stood in the library since 1845,
watching over new generations of Trinity students like me. Lord Byron was the type of student who we like to pretend doesn’t exist. He coasted through Cambridge on his title and reputation, and drew pleasure not from work but from outlandish statements such as keeping a bear in his Trinity rooms. He was hardly more respectable after he left Cambridge. His caustic wit won him as many enemies as fans, and he died indulging his bravado romanticism in Greece. Byron’s poems have won over generations of admirers, but many still disapprove of his lifestyle. Perhaps this is why I find it so heartening to see his alma mater scorn the Abbey’s prudishness and embrace its child despite his faults, immortalising him at the heart of the College’s academic life. One would hardly hold Byron up as a role model; nonetheless, those of us who don’t work as hard as we should, who know we could never match up to Newton or Darwin, are consoled by this statue, a reminder that there are as many forms of success as there are Cambridge alumni. To me it seems to say that, for better or worse, Byron found his niche – and so will his successors.
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HISTORY OF A FRIENDSHIP Adam Barnard, 30, theatre director and writer (Queens’ 1998), Rachel Sternberg, 30, actress and writer (Queens’ 1998) and Hannah Boyde, 29, actress (Downing 2002).
Words Anna Melville-James Photograph Christoffer Rudquist
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N THE STAGE of the Arcola Theatre, London, Adam Barnard, Rachel Sternberg and Hannah Boyde are chatting animatedly, bouncing between reviews of the play that Hannah is currently in and learning lines, like a well-timed improvisation. The stage is natural ground for the three friends, united through their love of the theatre since university and, busy catching up, they barely notice the crew bustling around them. Before long, the topic turns to one particular production, Amy Evans’s Strike, the Cambridge play where the friends met – and first worked – together. “Rachel and I did English, and I remember meeting her in my first supervision. But I only twigged she was an actress later in the first term when I was directing a freshers’ play and she was doing something off-the-wall at the ADC,” says Adam. “We created Amy Evans’s Strike from scratch with the writer in our final year, Hannah’s second year. Rachel and Hannah both played children, so we spent time improvising from our own childhoods. It was a fast track to everything we missed before we met. “Improvising is a funny way of finding things out about each other. There’s a lot we three know instinctively about how we’re going to react that comes out of that. I think your vulnerability emerges early with friendships forged around the theatre.” “In rehearsals you reveal sides of yourself, unwittingly sometimes, that perhaps other friends wouldn’t get,” Rachel explains. “You really have to trust each other to create and explore. There’s something very playful about
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the dynamic between the three of us.” “Back then, you would go into a rehearsal room, especially on more experimental plays, and you never knew what was going to come out. But by the first day you’d know who you’d clicked with,” adds Hannah. For all three friends, Amy Evans’s Strike remains a perfect moment – “student drama at its rose-tinted best,” says Adam. “That show was a big turning point, probably for all of us. We took it to the 2001 Edinburgh Festival and from making drama as university friends, suddenly the wider world was seeing it. We were young, in Edinburgh and a hit. You’re in your little pack and you do feel it’s you against the world.” “There’s such a magic about those university productions because you’re rehearsing and partying together, and everyone really clicks. After you leave, you get a bit of that, but you have to concentrate it into work hours, then go back to your life. It takes a while to get over it, doesn’t it? Professionally I mean.” Rachel laughs. “I’m still getting over it …” Adam credits warm nostalgia as part of the reason they decided, in 2005, to put the play on again with the same cast. “I had a professional company that had grown out of student drama and I was trying to work out what to do next with it. I was so fond of the play as our bridge from student to professional drama. So I thought why not mount it again in a more high-end production?” he explains. “We rehearsed it again with some of the same actors. But Hannah and Rachel were at the centre of it. The idea was to do it in London, and then tour. But the play wasn’t quite as
‘There’s such a magic about university productions because you’re rehearsing and partying together and everyone really clicks.’
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much of a success as it had been at Edinburgh.” “It wasn’t unsuccessful, but it didn’t have that same kind of buzz, I guess,” says Rachel. “Although the rehearsals were the happiest work time I’ve had in my professional life.” “Production-wise it was probably so much better!” says Hannah. “It was an odd balance, somehow we were plunged back four years, and we were in very different places in our lives, but it was really quite beautiful. It was also our first time working together since we’d got professional training.” “That added a special quality. It was a real stocktaking of how our lives had travelled,” says Adam. “I loved being at university, and there was something about coming back together that was also about the fact that none of us had quite got over how wonderful it was to be a student.” “Well, I didn’t love being at university, but these were the bits I loved …” interjects Hannah. “You were always slightly cooler,
that’s why!” Adam replies. Hannah laughs and counters, “Adam’s the mercurial one. And if I had to sum up Rachel, I’d say nurturing – not in a soppy way but it’s a big part of who she is.” “I’d say Adam’s inspirational. And puckish,” adds Rachel. “But underneath all of that, deeply thoughtful and sensitive, although I don’t mean he tries to hide that.” “Rachel was one of my first close friends at university and taught me a great deal about what a friendship is and can be. I stole many good qualities from her,” blushes Adam. “When I first met Hannah she slightly scared me, although it’s what I grew to like more than anything. She’s one of the most honest people I know. And that’s great for friendship and work because you don’t feel there’s a front. “Even though things slow down over the years after you leave, in the sense of just popping round to someone’s room for coffee, the links are still so strong you don’t have to do too much groundwork.” For Hannah, the
years have deepened the friendship further. “Sometimes now when I’m working with Adam I feel a lot closer and more open in things I say than 10 years ago. I feel like we’ve taken paths that meet creatively. We’re on more similar wavelengths now.” Adam agrees. “I think that’s true. And also in the sense that Rachel and I had a head start as we came to Hannah almost as a pair.” Work may have been the catalyst for their friendship, but all agree it now transcends the stage. “Our friendships will always exist, even if I never work with Adam or Hannah again. But each thing we’ve done together, in whatever permutation, has definitely added another strand,” reflects Rachel. “… And another set of in-jokes,” finishes Adam.
If you would like to share the history of your friendship, please do get in touch with CAM by email, alumni@admin.cam.ac.uk, or by post (see page 8). CAM 60 15
Thanks to the Arcola Theatre; Iona McLeish (set designer ) ; Ben Payne (lighting designer).
From left to right: Hannah Boyde, Rachel Sternberg, Adam Barnard.
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TAKE THREE
Matthew Parris (Clare 1969) was Conservative MP for West Derbyshire between 1979 and 1986. He is now an award-winning television and radio presenter, author and journalist. His columns appear weekly in The Times and The Spectator.
Lord Wilson of Dinton (Clare 1961) joined the Civil Service in 1966. He was appointed Permanent Under Secretary of the Home Office in 1994 and Secretary of the Cabinet and Head of the Home Civil Service in 1998. He is currently Master of Emmanuel College.
Robert Tombs is Professor of French History and a Fellow of St John’s College. His most recent work has been on the history of the relationship between the French and the British since 1688.
How much do the first 100 days of government really matter? Interviews by Lucy Jolin
truisms that really is true. If you don’t make your mark in the first 100 days, it’s going to be very difficult to make your mark after that. There are nettles that have to be grasped, and grasped immediately. And if you look as if you’re afraid to do that within the first 100 days, you’re unlikely to get the public support to do it later. The impact of the first 100 days needs to be felt on three levels. Firstly, at the level of policy: getting it started, getting things put in to the pipeline, knocking civil servants’ heads together. Impressing on the civil service your determination and your manifesto commitments. Secondly, insofar as the public are concerned, giving an impression of momentum. Looking like somebody who means what they say and does what they promise. Thirdly – and this is important in terms of your colleagues, backbenchers and cabinet – if you get off to a weak start, it will be much harder to get things done later. For coalitions, the first 100 days can be very volatile, with a lot of wheeler-dealing and negotiations behind the scenes. They show the shape not only of the manifesto of the government that’s formed but also the shape of the relationship between the two party leaders involved and each with his parliamentary party. The early indications have been astonishingly positive but the devil will be in the detail. I am, however, much more optimistic than this old cynic expected to be. RICHARD WILSON There’s an element of media hype about the ‘first 100 days’ question. But a change of government is always a cathartic moment for the public and for the government machine. It’s a moment when options open up again and a government is unencumbered by its own past. Governments can do important things in the beginning if they know what they want to do. You can use the first 100 days to get things through while your opponents are still stunned by their defeat, and while the electorate and the media are on your side. You may need to take firm action to reassure audiences such as the financial markets that you are in control. In some cases you may want to reverse things your predecessors did to signal a clear difference of vision.
Morten Morland
MATTHEW PARRIS It’s one of those political
But in substance it usually takes longer than 100 days truly to have an effect. So the first 100 days can be important for giving a sense of direction to a new government. But it actually takes two or three years before you really know the character of a government that is coming to power for the first time, although the seeds may be there at the beginning. It takes people in power much longer to get on top of the job and learn the ropes than outsiders may realise. ROBERT TOMBS The idea of a ‘100 days’ to strike the imagination and set the agenda originated in France – between Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. So France is an obvious place to test the concept. Nicholas Sarkozy and Napoleon Bonaparte both started with huge and vague ambitions: Napoleon, to turn back the forces of reaction; Sarkozy, to save France from decline by an unspecified ‘rupture’ with the past. These ambitions depended entirely on others for their feasibility. For Napoleon, the British, Russians, Austrians and Prussians. For Sarkozy, trade unions, students, voters. Finally, their plans went against the grain of
their own and their supporters’ traditions and instincts, causing doubt and confusion. Napoleon claimed he had transformed himself into a peaceful liberal. Sarkozy praised British economic methods as a model for France. I wrote a paper at the time predicting that Sarkozy would stay a Gaullist-style interventionist, not a free-marketeer. The financial crisis has confirmed this. Just like his predecessors, he now condemns ‘AngloSaxon’ economics, and the ‘rupture’ has disappeared. Perhaps a better model for a 100-day triumph is François Mitterrand in 1981, who chose symbolic acts that would enthuse his supporters and wrong-foot his opponents. He placed a red rose on the graves of selected national heroes and raised the minimum wage: simple, quick, memorable. One thing both Napoleon and Sarkozy did transform in their 100 days was political culture. In defeat, Napoleon became a hero who dominated French imagination long after Waterloo. Sarkozy has demolished the French image of the president as a patriarch, and made him into a politician. Here he has copied the ‘Anglo-Saxons’: he jogs in public and his private life is news. CAM 60 17
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SECRET CAMBRIDGE
A SUBTERRANEAN MYSTERY An underground shelter lies beneath Jesus College gardens. Diya Gupta explores its history. “
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HERE WERE 424 air raid alerts at Cambridge during the war, during which the enemy dropped 118 highexplosive bombs, 3 oil bombs and about 1000 incendiaries, and 29 people were killed. The Round Church, the Union Society and houses in Jesus Lane were hit in July 1942.” Jesus College’s 41st Annual Report, published in July 1945, provides this brief statistical evidence of the damage sustained by Cambridge during World War II. In the context of the most devastating war ever fought across the world, Cambridge’s wounds appear minimal.
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The city was not badly bombed, but because it was on the flight path for Coventry it faced a large number of air raid warnings. Walking in the verdant orchard of Jesus College in summertime some 65 years later, it is hard to imagine the shadow of war reaching the peaceful grounds of these gardens. The lush grass itself, however, reveals the immanence of wartime history, its smoothness interrupted by a mound with pronounced contours and doors on either end. The doors both conceal and convey the presence of civil defence planning: beneath their hinges lies a forgotten air raid shelter.
Built in the summer of 1939, this air raid shelter is now a dark, dank and empty place. With its ventilation shafts taken out at the end of the war, condensation has seeped in, creating puddles along the narrow 100-foot long corridor. Two small rooms appear to the left of the corridor, which veers out toward the stairs that provide the exit. The shelter is made of concrete, and dangling cables reveal that it once had electric supplies, which the College cashbook of April-May 1939 corroborates, listing the sum paid to connect the mains to the concrete trench. Five mysterious coloured tiles decorate the shelter’s wall; their purpose is hard to fathom. Paul Stearn, Head Gardener at Jesus College, has visited the shelter many times, particularly when it was dry enough to be used as storage space for gardening materials. He believes the shelter wasn’t used often during the war. The College was operating on reduced numbers, with many members called to the armed forces. Undergraduates reading medicine, science, engineering, mathematics and other subjects for which there was a demand for war purposes were allowed to proceed to their degree; the arts and social sciences, however, had a sizeable void. There were other students: Jesus had a strong RAF presence during the war, with many rooms being filled by Short Course Candidates for the RAF. The shelter could then have been used by the airmen, and the remaining fellows and students. But Stearn believes that fellows preferred to sit out air raid warnings in the comfort of their rooms rather than make their way underground. And in fact, there’s not much in the shelter attesting to human presence. The shelter isn’t mentioned in the archives of the College Council meetings, nor is its construction noted in the 1939 College Annual Report. Little used during the war, it was little remembered afterwards. For years a puzzle among undergraduates, interest in the shelter is slowly beginning to grow, with students being shown around this year. The fact that the shelter survives makes it a small yet inseparable part of the College’s long history. It exists not simply as a relic, but as a means of understanding the lives of those for whom such shelters were an inescapable part of reality. The Cambridge Regional College archives note the boyhood memories of Sam Harris, who remembers using air raid shelters near Midsummer Common. An especially vivid memory is of seeing the sky black with enemy bombers on their way to London. It is difficult to envisage such times now, and to realise that these shelters wouldn’t have survived a direct hit. The Jesus College air raid shelter serves as a call to our imagination of grimmer times.
Thanks to Paul Stearn, Peter Moore, Frances Wilmoth and Harry Tayler.
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AN IDLER’S IDYLL Tom Hodgkinson explains why there is nowhere he’d rather be than punting on the Cam.
Main image Patrick Lichfield
Corbis
S
INCE THE LATE 19TH CENTURY, punting has been associated with idleness. Indeed, its very idleness is what distinguishes punting from its industrious cousin, rowing in eights. In the eights, your hardworking team-players huff and puff down the river with great intensity of purpose; in the punt, your individualistic aesthetes drift aimlessly among the overhanging boughs and talk about love and Wittgenstein. And in the age-old battle between cultivated leisure and pointless activities like rowing, I am firmly on the side of the aesthetes and novel-readers. I studied English at Jesus College under Professor Stephen Heath, the poststructuralist critic. For the first two years I would rise at noon, watch Neighbours and wander into town with my good friend James Parker. We would buy a sandwich from Nettles, the self-righteous health food shop, and then drink coffee in Steps all afternoon while reading the NME. Back to college for dinner, we then went off to the Zebra or the Maypole. I certainly never went near a rowing boat. And actually, we rarely punted, preferring to play punk rock gigs in empty bars. However, after finals in our third year, during which I had actually spent many hours in the University Library trying to understand Foucault, Prof Heath proposed that our English set should take a couple of punts down the river for a picnic in Grantchester. He brought the smoked salmon, rosé and strawberries, and in a witty post-modern touch, also provided Thomas the Tank Engine paper plates, the joke being that my name is Tom and another of the engines is called James. We had a wonderful time and I can
remember the sense of enjoying a well-earned bout of top-quality loafing among the willow trees. As I recall, we discussed Roland Barthes and George Steiner with, as James Parker puts it today, “a general over-oxygenated sense of our own brilliance”. It was the first and only post-structuralist punting picnic I have experienced. In that unpleasant snobby way that students have, I had formerly associated punting with tourists and Sloane Rangers and I’m afraid I rather scoffed at the whole thing. I now wish that we’d gone out on punts for picnics far more often. In fact, sitting here at my desk at home, I can’t think of anything that I’d like more to do right now than spend a few hours in a punt with a group of witty and predominantly female companions, and discourse upon Rupert Brooke and Coleridge. The word ‘punt’ properly means a square-ended, flatbottomed craft, propelled with a pole. It is derived from CAM 60 21
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Martin Parr
the Latin, pontonium, meaning small boat, and we first find the word ‘punt’ used as a translation of pontonium in a Latin dictionary of 1005 made by Aelfric, first Abbot of Eynsham. The sort of punt that you take out for a picnic to Grantchester is properly called a ‘Thames leisure punt’, distinguishing it from its ancestors, small barges used for useful work like fishing in the Fens or moving cows from one place to another. Such work-punts had been in use in Cambridge in the 18th and 19th centuries, but punts built for pleasure did not arrive in Cambridge until 1902. Indeed, punting as a leisure activity really began in the Edwardian era, a time of The Wind in the Willows, Jerome K. Jerome and days off for clerks. Since 1861, the urban population had outnumbered the rural, and in 1871, new secular Bank Holidays were introduced. On their rare days of leisure, urban workers, released from office and factory, rushed to the rivers for brief respite from toil and for the opportunity to trail their hands in the water. There has always been money to be made from punting both students and vistors up and down the river. F. Scudamore started his business, Scudamore’s Punting Company, in 1906. In 1939, the business was taken over by one George Reynolds and still thrives today. In recent years, however, the Cam and the Granta have begun to suffer from overcrowding, as independent operators compete with Scudamore’s for a slice of this particularly profitable pie. But the Punt Wars, where rival touts haggle over groups of tourists, have recently taken a violent turn. In 2009 The Times quoted a punt tout for Scudamore’s as saying: “People were thrown against walls, pushed into alleyways. Some of the independent operators dropped stink bombs on our boats from the bridges, ruining our tours. They threatened to drill holes in the punts.” OK, stink bombs and threats to drill holes are hardly The Wire come to the Cambridge punting scene, but nevertheless there is clearly discord out there on the waterways. Let us hope that the Cam Conservators, the body which, since 1702, has been responsible for keeping the river navigable, can bring harmony to the waters. Nevertheless, the stink-bomb accusation brings to mind two pranks that I have heard of but never witnessed. One is the custom of snatching the punt pole from another punter’s hands. The other is possibly apocryphal. The story goes that a group of undergraduates fashioned a fake stone ball out of polystyrene and lined it up next to the real stone balls on Clare Bridge. Then they waited until a puntload of tourists drifted under the bridge, and then made a big show of heaving the ball off the bridge. As the harmless sphere fell towards the water, the tourists panicked and jumped out of the boat into the water.
‘The would-be punter should take up his position about three-quarters of the way towards the stern of the craft and let the pole slide through his hands.’
Happily, falling into the water is a timehonoured Cambridge tradition, even giving rise to a society, the Dampers Club, later abbreviated to the Dampers. To join this mysterious elite, it is necessary to fall into the river fully clothed. Its president for 1961-2 was the late Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame. He said in an interview that he thought the club might date back to the 19th century: “I have a vague feeling that the club dates back quite a long way but that could be anywhere from 1882 to 1924.” The club’s motto is per arduum ad alveum, meaning ‘through difficulty to the riverbed’. Chapman even once pushed a punt mounted on pram wheels and containing a female passenger the 70 miles from Cambridge to London in order to raise money for the 1960 World Refugee Year. “I have never ever and ever EVER indulged in such an exhausting activity in all my life,” he commented later. It has to be said that this kind of frenetic activity is not at all in the spirit of Cambridge punting. As for punting technique, I can’t say that this is something I ever mastered. I remember crashing into the shore when it was my turn to hold the pole. I suppose, like anything, practice
makes perfect. Certainly there is quite a lot to it, as this piece of advice, given in a Cambridge sports magazine in 1953, tends to suggest: The would-be punter should take up his position about three-quarters of the way towards the stern of the craft on the port or starboard side, and let the pole slide through his hands until it just touches the bottom … he then thrusts astern with both arms, taking a step in the same direction with the rear foot. At the end of a stroke, he pulls the pole forward almost horizontally above the water, either gathering it in hand over hand, or by a sharp jerk throwing it forward so that it slides through his fingers.
Alternatively, you could let someone else do the work while you grovel on a cushion with a novel or abandon yourself to languid poetical daydreams: that, I think, would be true to the spirit of Cambridge punting. Tom Hodgkinson (Jesus 1986) is editor of The Idler. Much of the information in this piece comes from the excellent book Punting by RT Rivington, privately published by the author in 1983. CAM 60 23
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ONE FOR HALL... Commensality – sharing a table – is a tradition worth fighting for, argues Michael Bywater. Photograph Charlie Troman
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I
T IS 7.30 IN THE EVENING. The College Hall is full. The roar of conversation would strike an outsider as incomprehensible or imbecilic. It is, in reality, both, sometimes simultaneously. A gong is rung. Everyone stands in a creak and clatter of benches. A door opens at the far end of the Hall and more people – fellows and their guests, anything from half-a-dozen to 30 or more – file in from wherever they’ve been doing whatever it is they do before the gong was rung and they filed in. The gong is rung again. Silence falls. The most senior fellow recites a grace, usually in Latin, sometimes brief to the point of terseness (“Benedictus benedicat”: the blessed blesses [you]), often more gilded and decorative: “Benedic’ Domine nobis et his donis tuis, quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi …” Those exposed to it, night after night, can complete it from some recess of the memory devoted to useless but marvellous things. Many will remember tiny points of difference; raised on the Corpus grace, when I came to spend some time at Magdalene I was surprised that the ‘his’ was left out, then delighted to find that this was because it is a general grace – “Bless us Lord and thy gifts” – not a particular grace for “these thy gifts”. Of such tiny details are small civilizations made. (Sometimes, too, of such tiny details are wars started.) Once, this scene was played out almost every night in term at almost every College. Then, for a while, it seemed as though the rituals of Hall were doomed to vanish, reserved, as a sort of public performance, for feast days and the raising of money. But now it is coming back. Ask around, or see for yourself. Most colleges offer some sort of special-occasion ‘Formal Hall’, as it’s generally known now. Some are mixed; some are undergraduate or postgraduate only. It’s unsurprisingly popular with students, who dress up and invite their boy- or girlfriends. The postgraduates take pictures before, after and sometimes during dinner, to put on Facebook and email to the folks back in Singapore, Beijing, Albuquerque or Fukushima. They drink wine, decorously. They converse, civilly. Or so it seems to me. But I’ve only seen them from the relative safety, and early departure for Combination, of High Table. It’s the daily, or at least the commonplace, nature of Hall that is its strength. The ancient tradition promotes one of the greatest and most underrated of virtues: that of commensality – the common table. Commensality promotes in its turn a sort of community coherence, the pleasures of conversation, and the blessing of manners. It turns what the misguided prophets of cost-benefit analysis regard as a physiological refuelling into an act of community and brotherhood (and sisterhood, naturally). We may consider the ancient Latin graces as a demonstration of exclusivity; but we can always make a mental reservation and instead call down a silent vilification upon the memory of Gerry Thomas, who in 1954 invented the 98¢ Swanson TV Dinner and helped put an end to a crucial component of civilisation in much of the world.
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his isn’t mere posturing. Throughout recorded history, people have realised, instinctively or explicitly, that food is about much more than just nourishment, and eating together about more than just food. As celebrated in the Christian church to this day, the communal meal, a memorial of the Passover Seder Night dinner, can be a eucharist – literally, a ‘thanksgiving’. Other words in our culture carry equal freight. The ‘refectory’ is derived from reficere, to remake or restore (as subsequently resurfaced in that 19th-century French invention, the restaurant, originally a place of specially prepared health-giving broths for the romantically sickly). The very idea of the ‘community’ has its roots in co-fortification or co-defending: a group of people who stand together. In the communal meal – what you eat, how you eat it, whom you eat it with – the dishes served are almost at the bottom of the food chain in significance. “Better a dinner of herbs than a stalled ox where hate is,” announces the Hebrew proverb, putting the efforts of the chef 26 CAM 60
firmly in their proper place. The weekly Shabbat supper brings the proverb to life: the ceremonial, and sanctified, portion of the Sabbath meal is simply bread, salt and a shared cup of wine. Everything else is what the classical Greeks called ‘opson’, a relish. The greatest dinner imaginable, were it to exclude the sharing of bread, salt and wine, would not count; yet that simple triad alone, for the poor, would suffice for the Sabbath thanksgiving. The Greeks, for their part, declared the ‘opsonophile’, the gourmand, an untrustworthy and somehow unmanly man, headed for the rocks. A few centuries later, the boastful excesses of just such an opsonophile, the crop-headed freedman Trimalchio in Petronius’s Satyricon, form the essential setting in which his vulgarity, his coarseness and his uncouth, boastful ignorance could be mercilessly satirised. Trimalchio’s greatest transgression (among many) is that he uses food not to promote good fellowship but to promote himself. Such abuses of the rituals of eating have always attracted contempt. Robert Dudley perhaps did himself more harm than good – certainly, he failed – in his attempts to woo Queen Elizabeth I with two vast banquets, well beyond the reason of his purse, once in 1560 and then again in 1575. The dinner given by President Loubert of France in 1900 for 22,295 French mayors seems ludicrous rather than grand or (its intention) republican, with its seven kilometres of tables in tents in the Tuileries, served by 3,000 waiters on bicycles. Novelists and poets have always known about the importance of eating. Food plays a crucial role in Charles Dickens, from the reconciliatory (and redemptive) dinner at the end of A Christmas Carol, to the technically astounding description of the Veneerings’ dinner-party in Our Mutual Friend. Oliver Twist is predicated on food (or its absence); Great Expectations begins with the food Pip steals for the escaped convict Magwitch, continues with the significantly frugal pastoral meals of bread and butter shared by Pip and Joe, and holds, at its gothic and fantastical core, the frozen virtuosity of the unconsum(mat)ed wedding-breakfast of Miss Havisham, finally not cooked, but incinerated. Eating is everywhere more important than simply putting food in and chewing. We could talk about the hereditary Sin-Eaters of Wales who eat a meal served on the dead one’s chest and so eat too his sins. We could talk about the great Hall as the locus of the nearunimaginable in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of the dinner-party as the site (and cause, and effect) of wider greed and ritual humiliation in Graham Greene’s Doctor Fischer of Geneva. We could think of the monastic refectory, the crucial (and magical) feasts at Hogwarts, of cannibalism fictive (in, for example, Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover), semifictive (in Montaigne’s essay On Cannibalism), or allegedly true – like the assertions that most religions have made that most other religions eat babies. Or the ageless suspicion, still current, that cannibal restaurants exist in most major European cities. We might think of the great pains that new associations take to have their own formal dinners, giving themselves some sort of legitimacy by doing so; at the rituals perpetuated by the Freemasons and their less self-exalted imitators like the Shriners, Rotarians, Lions and so forth. We could think of the feasts that mark the liturgical calendar in countless religions, the obligation on beginning barristers to eat a certain number of dinners in their Inn of Court; of the gastronomicospiritual chowder-marriage of Queequeg and Ishmael at that “fishiest of all fishy places”, the Try-Pots Inn in the Nantucket of Moby-Dick, or of the Last Supper itself; of the endless courtships and business-deals and friendships begun and ended, won or lost over meals, of Babette’s Feast where dining stands for reconciliation with life itself; or the location – by that most profoundly sensual of mystics, George Herbert – of the new Christian bargain-with-God at a (literal) love-feast: “You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.” So I did sit and eat.
And, of course, the greatest of them all, Shakespeare, deployed sitting and eating to build structures more complex than they seem.
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‘If eating is the Lawful Art, then what happened in the last two decades was, I think, that we thought all of lawfulness and nothing of the art.’
The “funeral bak’d meats” that “coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” in Hamlet are far more than the thoughtlessness of an over-eager cheapskate. They contain a transgression not only of the decencies of hospitality but of marriage and kinship, and, beneath that, the eerie signpost pointing to the inevitable cooling of a corpse and, thence to unspoken issues of cannibalism in which sex, food and death are profanely interrelated. It is at a feast that Banquo’s ghost appears and literally takes Macbeth’s seat – at the dinner-table, not his illegitimate throne. And oddest (and perhaps most telling) is Leontes’s response in A Winter’s Tale when a ‘dead’ thing becomes alive – and life-giving – when what has been taken as Hermione’s statue animates and steps down: “O, she’s warm! / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating.”
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f eating is the Lawful Art, what happened in the last two decades of the twentieth century was, I think, that we thought all of lawfulness and nothing of the art. Hall became a symbol of an outmoded tyranny; individual freedoms were all. Its precedence and formality (though in truth it was minuscule) became associated with paternalism – until the age of majority dropped from 21 to 18 on New Year’s Day 1970, at which point the Colleges ceased to be in loco parentis. They couldn’t tell us what to do! They weren’t the parents of us! Ha! We’ll eat burgers! From a van! That’ll show them! And, of course, the ancient symbolisms of ritual and community became modern symbolisms of that most heinous of social crimes, exclusivity. The thinking, of course, was rendered into purest wool-fat under the heat of popular politics. Exclusivity is part of human life. Extend it to its limits, and this thinking leads to the nastiness of
libertarianism. But part of the process of education – and, too, of communal living – is learning that things do not have to be extended to their limits. Nor is it possible to have exclusivity without inclusivity. The one without the other is literally ein lauter Nichts, an utter nothingness. The converse is also true: that you cannot obliterate exclusivity merely by obliterating inclusivity. Close Hall altogether, demolish the cafeteria, raze the kitchens to the ground and you still can’t stop people belonging to a College, or wanting to belong, or being glad they belong. The very idea of Hall, too, stands accused of elitism and privilege. The former accusation is so witless as to need no defence. As for the latter: yes, being a member of a College in one of the world’s greatest universities is a tremendous privilege. In any year, less than 0.000003% of the world’s population will have that privilege. To use the good old metric, if you stood the earth’s population on each other’s shoulders you’d get to the Moon and back a dozen times, even allowing for babies and toddlers. Stand the current, resident members of Cambridge Colleges on each other’s shoulders and you’d get from King’s Parade to the outskirts of Dumfries. It’s a privilege. And how can it be otherwise? But here’s the thing: if you are going to be privileged, it’s better to know you’re privileged, and one thing Hall does – the old, everyday Hall – is to remind you every evening how privileged you are. The gowns remind you. High Table reminds you. Knowing the odd little rules reminds you. I like knowing about the strange pudding rules at Magdalene High Table, and in pursuit of privilege and exclusivity I will tell you that Stilton is not classed as cheese, but I won’t tell you about the far odder rice pudding vs. egg custard one; you’ll have to find out yourself. I like knowing there’s something called ‘Sizing’ at Pembroke, though I’m not sure what it is. I like knowing the different rules for after-dinner Combination at some of the Colleges. And I like not having the faintest idea about such things at other Colleges. Here I belong, while here I have provisional, tentative access and there I am a complete outsider. Patterns, if you like, of kinship, of philia, of the things that lie right down in the roots of our common humanity. (I particularly like the idea of the Butler of – well, let’s just say A Great And Ancient College – whose appearance at the major feast each year is greeted with bated breath and lively anticipation by the Fellows, none of whom has any idea what new ancient tradition he will have accreted to his rôle this time. Recently it was a big stick which he banged on the floor four times, like the Comédie Française stage manager. But that’s not Hall; that’s the most formal of Formal Halls.) There are some who’d have Hall gone for good. Money, and the blind and stupid acceptance that the only possible model for any human activity is the profit-motivated business (a model which requires that you persuade someone that what you do is worth more than you know it to be worth) would be glad if Hall were abolished forever; and for a while it looked as though they might have got their way. It’s true that some colleges have reduced it to a bare minimum, while others never bothered much with ancient rituals in the first place. Some, like Wolfson and Lucy Cavendish, have no formal High Table. At others, there will be – gosh! – children. But these are the externals, the accidents. The thing itself has proven more durable than we might have thought, and thank goodness for that. The continued existence of Hall is not just a whole world away from the dark and solitary abyss of the TV dinner. Nor is it just about the continuation of communal eating as a daily ritual. It’s not (in some cases, horribly not) about food. In the broadest sense, Hall is about human civility, about the society of others, a shared culture, the acknowledgment of sheer good fortune and the ancient and fundamental joy of commensality. Long may it last. Michael Bywater (Corpus 1972) is currently writing a musical with Lieber and Stoller, the men who wrote Hound Dog and Stand By Me and almost everything else you sing in the bath. It is, perhaps unexpectedly, about Oscar Wilde. Thanks to Sidney Sussex for arranging photography. www.sid.cam.ac.uk/confer. CAM 60 27
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FirstLady As Professor Alison Richard comes to the end of her tenure as Vice-Chancellor on 1 October, she reflects on seven years in the University’s top job. Words Edward Stourton
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N E E V E N I N G in 2005 a small group of dark-suited, middle-aged men gathered in a private dining room at one of London’s most venerable clubs. It included a senior member of the Tory frontbench, the influential former editor of a broadsheet newspaper, a successful writer who enjoyed close links with the Blair administration, a brace of well-known columnists (one political, the other from the financial pages) and a high-profile public servant with a string of top-flight jobs in finance and industry to his name. If the Establishment really did exist with a capital ‘E’, this is what it would look like. As the candle-light danced on the mahogany and warmed the tones of the book spines lining the walls, I indulged myself in a fantasy: the club servant would discreetly close the door at the end of our dinner, leaving us to enjoy the coffee and port, then one of our number would tap his wine glass and say something
along the lines of “Gentlemen, we meet in a time of grave national peril...” and propose that we plot a coup d’état. What actually happened was rather different. There was in fact one woman among us: Professor Alison Richard, then relatively new to the job of Vice-Chancellor. She took the floor and gave a bravura performance. She laid out her case, listened, cajoled, mediated and controlled debate until she had persuaded us – and certainly me – that her ambition to raise at least one billion pounds for the sake of the University we all loved was not only realistic but necessary, and that we had a duty to help achieve it. Five years later, sitting in her office in the Old Schools behind King’s College Chapel, she tells me how the dinner came about. Charles Moore, the columnist and former Telegraph editor, had written a teasing Spectator piece taking issue with her fundraising ambitions. She sent him a letter, lunched CAM 60 29
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him, argued her case and then recruited him to advance the cause by trawling his contacts book for alumni who might be able to influence public and political opinion. It was an elegant piece of tactical footwork, and the incident revealed many of the qualities that have distinguished Alison Richard’s time as Vice-Chancellor: she is driven by a fierce devotion to the Cambridge cause, she believes the University’s alumni represent a powerful resource (as advocates for Cambridge as well as a source of funds), and she has brought a truly awe-inspiring energy to the job. Alison Richard was anything but a Cambridge insider when she arrived in October 2003. An undergraduate at Newnham, she took her doctorate at King’s College, London, and for most of her academic life had been based in the United States. She joined the faculty at Yale in 1972, chaired the Department of Anthropology there and then served for nearly a decade as Yale’s Provost, the number two post in the University’s hierarchy. As an anthropologist she is best known for her research work on primates in Madagascar. The “totally consuming task” of being ViceChancellor has made it impossible to continue that work, but she still speaks fondly of “the research that I love”, and says she misses the contact with students it offers. But she fights shy of the idea that her academic background means she brings any particular intellectual skill-set to the Vice-Chancellor’s office beyond a “broad-based interest in and curiosity about the world around me”. (I wanted to ask her whether she had observed any similarities between Madagascan lemurs and Cambridge dons, but never quite plucked up the courage.) Her fundraising campaign has hit the one billion pound goal two years ahead of schedule. Most of us would see that as cause to celebrate a job well done, and there is quiet satisfaction among the Vice-Chancellor’s staff that the original goal has been reached before she steps down in October. Elsewhere, she has nurtured and led change in areas as diverse as undergraduate education, interdisciplinary research and international strategy; the critical (and often tricky) relationships between the University and the Colleges, and between the University and government are stronger than ever. But Richard shows no sign whatever of easing the pressure on the accelerator as the end of her term of office approaches. At a recent lecture reflecting on her seven years in the job she attacked her own inauguration speech for its timidity: “re-reading it now makes me impatient”, she said, declaring, “these seven years have increased my sense of urgency.” She is not so much inspired by a dream (I suspect she is sceptical about dreams) as pursued by unanswerable questions – specifically “the question snapping at my heels … are we moving fast enough?”. She runs, she tells me, “on the basis of anxiety about the future”, and instead of simply celebrating 30 CAM 60
‘She is resistant to the idea of trying to privatise on the American model. She dismisses talk of a unilateral declaration of independence as “the language of warfare”, saying “I don’t think a university can go to war with the government and win”.’
the achievement of raising one billion pounds, she is already redefining it as a “milestone, not a target”, and wondering how the momentum of fundraising can be maintained so that Cambridge can sustain its competitive edge against better funded peers. Professor Richard’s office was once the heart of the old University Library, and is known as the Dome Room – in her desk drawer she keeps a stash of postcards of an evocative Thomas Rowlandson picture of the room in its 18thcentury glory, full of stout and self-important looking scholars and divines. But at some stage the dome was lost to the finance department on the floor above, and, for all its gracious space and fine panelling, the Vice-Chancellor’s office is a good deal less grand than the accommodation many Masters enjoy in their Lodges. That perhaps reflects the University’s somewhat ambivalent attitude to the ViceChancellor’s role when the job was first established; Cambridge has had a permanent, full-time vice-chancellor only since 1991 (until then the post revolved between the heads of houses), so for the first 781 years of the University’s existence there was, as she puts it, “no central organising intelligence” running the place. Professor Richard is only the third person (and the first woman) to hold her post, and the nature of the role was still evolving when she took it on. Her leadership has been marked by a very clearly articulated vision of where she believes Cambridge should stand in relation to government and society as a whole. One of the reasons for the current fundraising campaign
was her belief that the University had become too heavily dependent on government funding. The current crisis in the public finances has given her more than enough ammunition to argue the case for a greater degree of financial independence, but there is a broader point too. Richard argues that public money can come with “strings attached”; there is a risk, she says, that the “vitality and exuberance” of the University could suffer under “the deadening hand of bureaucracy” if the state plays too big a part in its life. But she is equally resistant to the idea of trying to privatise the University on the American model. She dismisses talk of a unilateral declaration of independence as “the language of warfare”, and says “I don’t think a university can go to war with the government and win”. And here too she makes a broader point about the University’s place in British society; public funding is, she argues, an important symbol of its public value. “We should be a target for (public) investment”, she says, “because we contribute mightily.” In the weeks before our interview Professor Richard had travelled to the Gulf, India and China to preach the Cambridge message, and her punishing schedule was further complicated by an enforced extra week in Beijing because of the Icelandic ash cloud which closed down our air space (a member of her staff told me that when she finally made it back to Heathrow at 5.30 am, she showered and breakfasted at home and then came straight into the office). She takes the Vice-Chancellor’s ambassadorial role very seriously, and much of her “anxiety about the future” concerns Cambridge’s ability to hold its place on the world stage. “For 500 years we were one of only a handful of universities in the world,” she points out, “and for 200 years we rode on the coat-tails of empire.” Now Cambridge faces competition from rich, world-class institutions such as Harvard and Yale in the United States and what she calls the “powerhouses” of Asia. I ask her what the Chinese like about the Cambridge brand, and what they make of its sometimes eccentric traditions, the ‘Porterhouse Blue’ aspect of its reputation. “They are”, she says firmly, “too polite to mention Porterhouse Blue” – which very effectively closes down any further pursuit of this frivolous line of inquiry by making me feel I had been rather less polite than the Chinese. Nobel Prizes are, apparently, the measure of success that really impresses them, and Cambridge excels in the Nobel Prize league table. Richard thinks very carefully about everything she says, so perhaps one of the reasons she has been able to achieve so much as Vice-Chancellor may be that she so scrupulously avoids claiming credit for anything. The relationship between the University and its alumni has been revolutionised during her term, and I ask whether this is the achievement of which she is most proud. She speaks eloquently about the
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CV 1969 BA, Newnham College, Cambridge. 1973 Awarded PhD by the University of London, having joined the faculty of Yale University as assistant professor. 1976 Married Robert E. Dewar. They have two daughters, Bessie and Charlotte. 1977–2003 Co-director, Programme of Conservation and Development in Southern Madagascar. 1986 Full Professor, and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Yale. 1991 Director of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. 1994 Appointed Provost of Yale. 2003 Inaugurated as the 344th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
transformation of the “polite but sullen” alumni she encountered when she first took on the job, and talks enthusiastically about the steps that have been taken to create a “global community” of Cambridge supporters. But she insists that, “A Vice-Chancellor’s capacity to do anything unaided is close to zero … I don’t think of these things as matters that I have accomplished.” This determined modesty must surely have been a help in the notoriously prickly world of academic politics; during her time in office, Cambridge has been mercifully free of the sort of donnish ructions that periodically propel Oxbridge news onto the front pages of the national press. The only moment during our interview when Alison Richard’s fluency faltered came when we talked about what life might hold after leaving Cambridge. She looked quite blank for beat or two as she contemplated her future. The morning after the ceremony at which she hands over to her successor she will be on a plane to her beloved Madagascar (she has kept up her association with the island and its primates by visiting her old research project every summer). Her husband is American, and the couple will reclaim their house in Connecticut, which has been rented out while she has been based in Cambridge. They are also looking for a pied-à-terre in London. The couple have one grown-up daughter in Britain and one in the United States, and Alison Richard says there are things she loves and things she deplores in both countries, so both will be home. But as
to what she might do – and her energy is still so formidable that it is difficult to imagine her without a task in hand – there seem to be no plans at this stage; “I am”, she said of her future, “blessed with a plentiful lack of imagination” – a statement I do not quite believe. She does admit to a certain weariness after nearly seven years of seven-day weeks. “I miss having a life”, she told me, adding, “actually I don’t even have time to miss that.” And just before our interview ended she told a story in which I detected just a glimmer of pride in what she has achieved. Prince Philip, the University’s Chancellor, told her that he had been doubtful about the idea of a full-time Vice-Chancellor when it was first proposed. He said that he had been told that there was an ‘opportunity cost’ to being without a full-time Vice-Chancellor, although they could not cite any examples of opportunities that Cambridge had missed. He was also doubtful of the wisdom of doing something just because everyone else was doing it. But, he went on, he had become reconciled to the system “... after seeing what you and your predecessors have achieved”. There may still have been a few members of the Cambridge community who doubted the value of the Vice-Chancellor’s role seven years ago; no one seriously challenges it today, and Alison Richard deserves much of the credit for that – whether or not she chooses to accept it.
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This sporting life Why do seven million people tune in to watch an obscure river race between just two universities? Robert Hudson explores why sport is so often the conduit for national identity around the world. Illustrations Chris Riddell
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HERE ARE TWO BOAT RACES every year. One is a bitter contest between 18 athletes whose glistening teamwork hides an all-too-human world of petty competition and compromised decisionmaking. The other is a great British jamboree with a fervent half-hour-a-year fanbase of 250,000 people Thames-side and seven million on television. This second race is a myth – but there’s nothing wrong with that. Myths are part of who we are. In 1948 TS Eliot listed 13 things that made English culture distinctive: “Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.” His selection was personal and of its time, but his message is clear: sport was essential to Englishness. And it’s not just Englishness. The French revel in the Tour, the Americans in Major League Baseball, the Indians in Indian Premier League cricket. As the Judge Business School’s Dr Mark de Rond, who wrote an ethnographic account of the 2007 boat race crew, explains, it’s not the sport itself – the battle of wills, the physical prowess – that matters to fans. “Supporters care more about the myth. In a world where it can seem as if everything has a price and
everyone is a means to some end, sometimes we need simpler heroes.” So how does a sport go from esoteric event to national symbol? In the case of the Boat Race, the most romantic answer is that it was the pre-eminent Oxbridge contest when Oxbridgians were inventing half the games we play, and is encoded into the DNA of modern sport in the same way that we all have strange bits of anatomy left over from our fishy ancestors. Less romantically, Dr Christopher Young, principal investigator for the Sport in Modern Europe group and fellow at Pembroke, says the crucial moment was 1954, when the BBC and the British government decided to make the race one of the sporting calendar’s crown jewels. The annual television presence fixed the race as national icon. Other ‘national’ events have a similarly symbiotic relationship with their media. The Super Bowl is watched by more than 100 million Americans; it is a media truism that more than half of these viewers claim to care more about the high-profile commercials than the match. If you’re being glib and reductive, both America and American football are relatively young but obsessed with celebrating their own history; they talk loftily about ideals and character at the same time as being unabashedly concerned with making CAM 60 33
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money. The Super Bowl also pretends that the rest of the world doesn’t really exist. The Tour de France, on the other hand, welcomes the world and makes it French. Alan Tomlinson, Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton, explains that, unlike the Boat Race, the Tour casts the nation as participants rather than spectators. “The Boat Race is an elite at play and on display. Tour riders have traditionally come from tough, working-class backgrounds, and people feel part of it. You go to villages and everyone’s involved.” But just like the Boat Race and the Super Bowl, the Tour is indivisible from its media coverage. It was founded, funded and hyped in 1903 by L’Auto, the struggling precursor of sporting paper L’Equipe. And, as Tomlinson explains, the Tour’s growth has continued to be fuelled by media and money. Today, the riders are preceded by a long caravan of sponsors’ vehicles distributing gifts. The leader of the mountain-climbing competition wears the ‘traditional’ and ‘historic’ polkadotted jersey – which was designed in 1975 to echo a sponsor’s chocolate-bar wrapper. In his introduction to Realms of Memory, a brilliant collection of essays about what it means to be French, Pierre Nora writes: “Tradition is memory that has become historically aware of itself.” George Vigarello, in an essay about the Tour, echoes this sentiment, pointing out that as early as 1908 Georges Rozet wrote in Le Temps that the race had become “national property”, that within a few decades it had become a national ritual, and by now it is “an institution so sanctified as to seem ageless”. Vigarello goes on to explain how the Tour had origins in monarchical processions, demonstrating the wealth and greatness of France; in the self-sufficient journeyman’s tour, learning his trade; and in the pedagogical device of teaching children about France through a virtual tour. All these elements still remain, but they have been constantly reinvented. What was once a paean to the thrilling modernity of speed, industrialisation and the machine has become a sacred piece of traditional culture. Vigarello asks if this means it has become an anachronism – and disarmingly replies that while this is possible, the Tour is so conscious of its own relationship with time that it is hard to call it anachronistic. Like the Super Bowl, the Tour constantly adapts to what its fans want. And history is a critical part of its potent mix of selling points. As is the obvious fact that it features the world’s best cyclists. The Boat Race gains prestige by attracting top-class oarsmen. The Varsity cricket and rugby matches have lost some of their non-Oxbridge appeal now that professionalism means that the universities don’t regularly produce internationals. It is unsurprising, then, that the Indian Premier League wants to collect a Champions
‘Sport is amenable to all kinds of stories. Fans, historians, participants and politicians take different things from it. Most of these stories are told from a distance, and they often ignore the palpable joy that comes from being a fan.’
League concentration of cricket talent. CNBC India’s Managing Editor, Udayan Mukherjee, explains that the importance of top international quality “cannot be overstated”. The result is what Daily Mail cricket writer Lawrence Booth (Sidney Sussex 1994) calls the “first domestic cricket competition with global resonance”. Shashi Tharoor, the former UN UnderSecretary-General has claimed that the international make-up of the IPL teams means, “partisanship has suddenly lost its chauvinist flavour”, but the cricket historian Gideon Haigh disagrees. Haigh says when franchises avoided bidding for Pakistan stars at this year’s players’ auction, it was tantamount to an economic embargo. For him, the IPL is the triumph of sporting nationalism rather than its end – a global competition which only one nation can win. Individual sports and events can epitomise nations, but sport’s biggest patriotic parades are the World Cups and Olympiads, the grand ‘megaevents’ where countries, under banners of fraternity, fight like cats in a sack. Dr Young (with Kay Schiller of Durham University) is just about to publish a book on the 1972 Munich Games. Initially, they looked like an understated triumph. They rejected the monumentalism of preceding Olympiads and showed a confident, positive Germany. But then Arab terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes, and the atrocity still dominates popular memories of the event. The soci-
ologist Miguel de Moragas (among others) has explained how the meaning of megaevents gets created over time. Young cites the 1978 Argentina World Cup. “People celebrated at the time, but that period has got so associated with the military junta that Argentinians don’t make so much of it.” But an event’s generally accepted cultural meaning can be misleading. Organising and running the Olympics was a seminal event in the lives of many thousands of young Germans. As they went on to play important economic roles in German life, they took this formative experience with them in all kinds of subtle and important ways. Sport is amenable to all kinds of stories. Fans, historians, participants and politicians take different things from it. Most of these stories are told from a distance, and they often ignore the palpable joy that comes from being a fan. In his 1929 novel The Good Companions, JB Priestley described it beautifully: “To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.” Temporarily free from their daily problems, Priestley’s fans swap judgements “like lords of the earth”. They get to be part of something bigger than themselves, an idea, a dream. Mary Beard and Keith Hopkins have written that Romans went to the Colosseum to express their Romanness. Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were part of a presumably sizeable rump of Romans with mixed feelings about gladiatorial bloodshed, but the Colosseum was a distinctively Roman building showing distinctively Roman entertainments, and spectators were pledging public allegiance to a certain idea of Rome, to a hierarchical but interacting citizenry watching each other and being watched. Being part of a group, for a moment, simplifies a complex world and makes it easier to live in. Watching the English football team on a big screen in a pub, supporters can publicly express patriotism and fellow-feeling. Mark de Rond explains that the Boat Race embodies a similarly useful simplification. “Striving for identity is very human. Supporting the Boat Race expresses allegiances to a particular idea of Britishness.” For de Rond, this idea is “fair-mindedness, perseverance and subsuming the self in the interests of the whole”. He is well aware that some Boat Race critics favour an alternative mythic simplification, calling the race a symbol of elitism and privilege. They are making their own comment on Britishness. Every myth we pledge our support to says something about who we are.
Robert Hudson (Jesus 1992) studied history and played Blues hockey. His first novel, The Kilburn Social Club, is published by Jonathan Cape. CAM 60 35
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tuck in Azerbaijan and don’t know where to start? Find yourself posted to Western Australia and don’t know a soul? Or want to start networking in Chile? With over 370 groups around the world, on any given evening, somewhere on the globe, a group of Cambridge alumni are sure to be holding an event. Many Cambridge graduates are only just beginning to notice the burgeoning network of non-collegiate groups, from those for British regions and foreign countries to those for alumni with shared interests or affiliations like the Cambridge University United Nations Association (CUNNA), or Cambridge Societies’ Tours, which organises group holidays. But if your idea of an alumni group is a room full of people in black tie reminiscing about the good old days, think again. “People often assume alumni groups are mainly about nostalgia,” says the University’s Alumni Relations Manager for Networks and Volunteers, Molly Peoples. “Of course, some do focus on traditions which can be wonderful, but many have a very different focus. We want people to see the potential of this network and take it forward. Joining a group can be a fantastic networking opportunity for business. And at the other end of the scale it’s a way to try out everything from snow safaris to speed dating with new friends. Many group members are also very civic-minded people who want to do things for their community.” From a professional perspective, meeting other Cambridge alumni is a no-brainer. “Cambridge alumni are often interesting, hardworking and focused, and this is a very useful resource,” says James Drinkwater (Pembroke 2002), has launched the Cambridge Sustainability and Climate Change Network. His motivation to devote his spare time to this new alumni group, despite working long hours as a trainee City solicitor, is simple: frustration
AGLOBAL NETWORK
There are over 370 alumni groups worldwide but what do they actually do? Olivia Gordon discovers that the answer can be rather surprising. Illustration Robin Heighway-Bury
Groups are run independently of the University but CARO actively supports groups with set-up and publicity. To find an alumni group, visit www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/networks. To discuss starting a group, call Jan Pudney on +44 (0)1223 760158. 36 CAM 60
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at the lack of communication between people from different professions working on sustainability issues. “I’d guess that hundreds if not thousands of alumni work in the sustainability sphere – it’s a real shame these alumni aren’t visible to one another,” he says. Only a few weeks in, having just advertised on the alumni website and in an e-bulletin from the alumni office, Drinkwater has already had 60 expressions of interest, from retirees with years in the energy industry to young people taking over the baton, and from all over the world. Drinkwater plans to organise activity around regular talks and discussions that will lead to the formation of focused working groups; using social networking group LinkedIn and a website will give the group an online platform to involve international members. Drawing on the Cambridge connection taps into a talent pool beyond the usual professional networks. “Most existing sustainability networks are corporate and dominated by senior people, but I want to involve academics, environmentalists and people working in social sustainability; professionals of all ages and levels of seniority,” says Drinkwater. “And the strength of alumni groups is that they have no agenda other than to promote knowledge-sharing.” Another brand- new professional group setting out to make a real difference is the Cambridge Film and Media Academy, a group for alumni working in film, TV and new media (www.camfa.org). The brains behind it is the founder of internet radio station Total Rock, David Clouter (Emmanuel 1978), who also launched Cambridge University Radio as an undergraduate. Within its first three months CAMFA has already gained over 100 members, from British filmmakers to writers, producers and directors in Hollywood. “Clearly Cambridge alumni have made a significant contribution to the industry, and this is about bringing together people who would love to sit down around a table together but have never had the opportunity to do so,” Clouter explains. Events, starting in the autumn, won’t be limited to drinks – there will be a strong practical focus with talks, workshops and film set visits. “The dream would be for people to hit it off at our events and go off and make a film together,” Clouter says. CAMFA will also offer advice to undergraduates and alumni starting out. “If we can alleviate some of the long struggles many talented newcomers have with getting into the industry, we’d love it,” says Clouter. “We’re calling the society an academy because we want to put something back. It’s as much about creating something new as reminiscing.” Other groups aim to bring alumni in a geographical area together. The biggest geographical alumni association is the Cambridge Society of London, which has around 500 members, while the tiniest groups
The Cambridge Society The Cambridge Society holds a unique place in Cambridge history. The brainchild of then ViceChancellor Sir Jack Linnet, the Society was founded with a clear aim: to keep Cambridge graduates in touch with developments at the University, complementing the work of individual Colleges. From that visionary idea sprung a society that, for over 40 years, brought together alumni through a vibrant network of branches, the annual Cambridge Society Day and through 60 issues of the Society’s magazine, Cambridge. Maintaining such an extensive network is intensive – and skilled – work. Many alumni have made a contribution but the guidance of Leslie Wayper, Dr Alan Clark, Brian Cooper and Bill Kirkman and the hard work of staff such as Katie Knapton and Jan Pudney (nee Thulborn) helped to make the Society a success. The great pleasure that the Society took in helping its members reconnect with old friends and making new ones through reuniting graduates with Cambridge has now been passed to the University’s Alumni Relations Office (CARO). The University owes a great debt to the work of the Cambridge Society; its founders, staff and members. Their insight, inspiration and dedication to Cambridge has created a history and inheritance of which the University and its members can be truly proud.
are often one or two contacts in a country with few Cambridge alumni, as is the case in Armenia and Cambodia, for instance. Fresh groups start all the time: recent months have seen new societies in Venezuela and Tanzania. “There’s a real feeling of solidarity,” Molly Peoples says. “With the recent travel problems caused by the Icelandic volcano, the local group in Vancouver helped a Cambridge member stuck in the area.” The friendly Oxford and Cambridge Society of Austria, running for 16 years and based in Vienna, is typical of a thriving country group – with 70 members aged from 28 to 85, a broad mixture of nationalities, and events from University Challenge-style pub quizzes to theatre evenings and formal dinners, there are new faces at every event, so it’s by no means a closed circle. “People tend to talk more about life now than time at Cambridge, especially as everyone was there at different times,” says the President, IT consultant Michael Milkowits (Sidney Sussex 2000).
As well as Austrians who studied at Cambridge, members include many British, Australian and American nationals who work for the United Nations, the British Embassy or the university in Vienna – and meetings here can be life-changing: the group is credited with two marriages. Many alumni societies are busy recruiting. “Our membership had been static for a number of years and we needed to expand particularly amongst younger alumni,” says retired solicitor Patrick Karney (Trinity 1960), secretary of the Cambridge Society of Oxfordshire. A recent recruitment drive, with the help of the Cambridge Alumni Relations Office, has resulted in a trebling of membership – and a lot of the new members are of a significantly younger generation. “This was a surprising and most gratifying result,” Karney says. “We look forward to engaging with these new members and developing new ideas for the mutual benefit of all our members. In July we are organising a private visit and reception at the recently refurbished Ashmolean Museum, when we hope to meet many of our new members.” Of course there is much to be said for the traditional university group, and the oldest alumni society is the Cambridge and Oxford Society, Tokyo (www.camford.org). Founded around 1905 by Japanese aristocrats who studied at Cambridge, the group was forced to ‘suspend operations’ temporarily during the second world war. Today, around two thirds of the 300 members are Japanese nationals and one third British or other, and about three quarters are male. With current members including the British ambassador to Japan, the Crown Prince of Japan and Princess Takamado, it is often said that, should you find yourself in Japan, within a week the Society will introduce you to all the important people over a long cool Tokyo Joe. There are regular drinks parties and dinners but the biggest date each year is the summer party at the British ambassador’s residence in Tokyo. “We’ve been lucky in that the whole time the Society has existed, only one ambassador has not been an Oxbridge man,” notes Honorary Secretary Tim Minton (St John’s 1977), who is head of a college language department and joined the Society soon after arriving in Japan 28 years ago. Long friendships and dynastic histories are created. The last surviving member who matriculated before the 1940s, architect Hidehiro Takaki (Gonville and Caius, 1927), attended into his nineties until he died a few years ago. And even at the most formal of events, Tim stresses, “the atmosphere is very relaxed, especially after the first couple of glasses. Several people have commented that they hesitated to join, thinking it would be stuffy, but that they were pleasantly surprised by the lack of stuffiness once they came along. A key factor in this, I think, is that all the members share one significant binding force.” CAM 60 37
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Review Our contributors
Sophie Pickford is a sports journalist and photographer. She held a research fellowship at St Edmund’s in History of Art from 2007-2009. Martin Hartley
Julian Dowdeswell is the Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute and has worked extensively in the polar regions over the past 30 years.
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University Matters Peter Agar, Director of Development and Alumni Relations
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Summer reading What will you be reading on the beach this summer? CAM gathers in the cream of summer book recommendations
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Right to reply Professor Julian Dowdeswell
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Sport Cambridge University Athletics Club
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Prize crossword Halfback by Schadenfreude
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UniversityMatters Securing the future
Peter Agar (Downing 1968) took up his current role in 2002, following an international career in both the public and private sectors.
Peter Agar Director of Development and Alumni Relations Patrick Morgan
I
never expected to end up spending my time encouraging alumni and others to consider Cambridge as a priority for their philanthropy. After all, I never felt particularly at home as an undergraduate, and it was with relief that I finished my exams in June 1971, went to a May Ball and fled with ne’er a backward glance. Cambridge seemed to me then to be a rather insular and often reactionary place. Forty years on, I have changed my mind. I do think that the future of Cambridge matters and that alumni should be firmly encouraged to be part of it. What prompted my conversion? For me there are four key elements. I share them here because I know that many alumni remain sceptical about Cambridge’s rights to their affection and financial support. First (and this is clearly a very personal view) Cambridge has changed for the better. There are equal numbers of men and women; colleges are real communities in which students are treated as the young adults they are; Cambridge makes a real effort to attract able students who wouldn’t naturally apply; town/gown relationships have greatly improved; and, most astonishing to my generation, students are actually asked to evaluate their teaching! In 1968 much of Cambridge seemed stuck in about 1955 (and was pleased to be); in 2010 it really does feel like a place that looks to the future and constantly wants to improve. Secondly, doors and windows that were closed to me as an undergraduate have been opened. I see the extraordinary range of research, scholarship and teaching in every corner of the academy. I understand the efforts that so many academics put into developing innovative teaching (which I see each year when the Cambridge Foundation hosts the ceremony for the Pilkington Teaching Prizes). In sum, I realise how limited my experience of Cambridge really was as an undergraduate. Beyond economics and some work at the ADC, my most thrilling moments were hearing WH Auden recite in Great St Mary’s and seeing a distant and stooped EM Forster turning the corner of the Gibb’s Building in King’s. In 1968 the rest was hidden, no doubt, in part, due to my own failings and ignorance. But what a shame that no one took the trouble
‘Only around 40% of the funding needed for small group teaching comes from government and 15% from fees: the rest must be found from the University and the Colleges’ own income.’
to point me at the Fitzwilliam and Kettle’s Yard or encourage me to hear a young Stephen Hawking speak. Thirdly, I now understand where income comes from and what it is spent on. Before I returned to Cambridge I would have assumed, along with many respondents to the 2002 alumni survey, that ‘Cambridge is rich’ and for that reason alone wasn’t a particularly deserving charitable cause. Now I understand that the small group teaching model, one of the things that I did value about Cambridge,
and which continues to be a bedrock of a Cambridge education, costs almost £17,000 a year to provide. Only around 40% of that comes from government grants, around 15% comes from undergraduate fees and the rest is found from the University and the Colleges’ own income, a large proportion of which derives from current and historic benefactions. If supervision-based teaching is to continue then philanthropy is essential. The fourth and final reason is more philosophic, but for me, at least, is the keystone of my belief in alumni support for universities in general and Cambridge in particular. I have become convinced that the kind of university that Cambridge tries to be – intellectually independent, iconoclastic, tolerant, diverse; experimental, overlain with passionate aspiration to be the best – is essential to a civilised and indeed to a civil society. Of course, we often fail to meet those aspirations. But the striving to be is, in itself, often sufficient to ensure a lasting contribution to the wider world. If we value and want to preserve pluralistic and democratic societies then I believe that we must nurture universities with Cambridge’s values at their heart. A diversity of income is key: universities cannot fulfil this potential if they are financially dependant on one paymaster. Building sustained philanthropic support for our Colleges, Faculties and Departments, our great collections and our students, is an essential part of the mix to ensure that Cambridge’s true independence is maintained. Starting as a sceptic has one great advantage; it makes me more aware of how hard we need to work to persuade as many alumni as possible that connecting with, and supporting, Cambridge is necessary. We cannot simply assume your loyalty. We need to work hard to win your hearts and your minds. We need to ensure that today’s students (and tomorrow’s alumni) get the broadest and best experience of Cambridge that we can provide while they are here, and that today’s alumni have multiple opportunities to experience the Cambridge of today, not simply to be drawn back to memories of the Cambridge of the past. www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/campaign CAM 60 39
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Books: Summer reading Interviews Olivia Gordon Illustrations Belle Mellor
What will you be reading on the beach this summer? Whether serious or frivolous, CAM’s alumni and academic panel has a recommendation to delight every bibliophile.
Katie Derham
Professor Robert Gordon
(Magdalene 1988), broadcaster I will be reading The Devil’s Casino by Vicky Ward(John Wiley, £18.99), about the financial crisis as seen by the Lehman wives – it sounds a fabulously entertaining and shockingly candid insight into what really happened in the boardrooms of Wall Street in the days and months before the crash. When I covered the financial crisis from the British perspective, I had to play a very straight bat – and yet the characters were ghoulishly fascinating: big bad Lehman’s boss Dick Fuld; the neurotic Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Vicky Ward seems to have opened a rich vein of gossip and insight into these egos from the women who knew them best.
Regius Professor of Hebrew I’ve some catching up to do. Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, £18.99) will be difficult for me to avoid. Sand teaches contemporary history at Tel Aviv University. His book is very much in the revisionist mode, working from a highly negative version of ancient Israelite history to a similarly negative conclusion about modern Jewish and Israeli identity. According to Sand, such staples of the Jewish story as exile and ethnic distinctiveness are part of a sustained myth-making ripe for deconstruction. I’ve bought the book, but I doubt that I’ll buy the argument. Just about to appear is Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement (Polity, £15.99) by
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Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell. This explores the Hamas psyche and the circumstances in which it has moved from bullet to ballot-plus-bullet. Anyone interested in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament, as I am, can hardly avoid thinking about its pervasive ‘land theology’, which is essential background to the present conflict in Israel/Palestine.
one of the most innovative contemporary artists, who, by condensing and reframing the beauty of the natural world, increases our appreciation and respect of it. Although best known for his ephemeral work, this stunning book reviews all of his permanent pieces. His artistic importance is made clear; I believe he is equally important for redefining the importance of nature.
Simon Russell-Beale (Caius 1979), actor As an actor, I don’t need any inspiration to go back to Shakespeare, but Arden recently published the 1727 play Double Falsehood (Arden, £16.99) – which they’ve accepted as partly Shakespeare’s work. It seems a bit lightweight compared with the Shakespeare I know, but tracing Shakespeare’s hand through it is fascinating. I’ve also begun a new book of beautiful essays on Shakespeare, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Harvard University Press, £29.95), by the late Cambridge professor Tony Tanner, whom I remember from my undergraduate days as one of the glamorous lecturers. I highly recommend it – it’s always lovely to read someone who’s really immersed in Shakespeare.
Professor Malcolm Longair Emeritus Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy I will be catching up on the wonderful new Edinburgh University Press editions of the original versions of the novels of Walter Scott. The Press has gone back to the original manuscripts and restored the Scottish dialect that was smoothed out by London publishers. As a great lover of Walter Scott, and as a Scot myself – so familiar with the original dialect – I’ve been collecting the new series, and the last two novels which have just appeared, The Talisman and The Betrothed (Edinburgh University Press, £55), will give me enormous pleasure. Professor Longair’s High Energy Astrophysics (3rd edition) will be published by CUP in 2011.
Daisy Goodwin (Trinity 1980), broadcaster I’m the third generation of women in my family to go to Cambridge. Reading Bluestockings (Penguin, £9.99) by Jane Robinson, about the history of women’s education in this country, made me realise how different my grandmother’s experience must have been to my three years at Trinity. This is a wonderful book, full of glorious first-hand accounts of these pioneering women, and really brings to life how hard they struggled to win the education that we now take for granted, and the dilemma they faced having to choose between love and career. It’s a beautifully written, engrossing read that made me glad that I am a woman with choices.
Professor William Sutherland Miriam Rothschild Chair of Conservation Biology I’d recommend The Andy Goldsworthy Project (Thames and Hudson, £35) by Molly Donovan and Tine Friske. I consider Andy Goldsworthy
John Simpson (Magdalene 1963), BBC World Affairs Editor I have been recommending three books to everyone. First, Did You Really Shoot the Television? A Family Fable (Harper Press, £20), by Max Hastings. It’s a superbly written, honest, comically painful account of youth from our finest journalist. Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History (Faber, £20), by Rachel Polonsky, is about the complex reality of life under totalitarianism: among other revelations, how Molotov collected the signed editions of books by writers whose death sentences he signed. Mesmerising. And Constable in Love (Penguin, £9.99), by Martin Gayford, a detective story about art and relationships, which opens up an entire world. As with all really good books, I felt bereft when I finished it. John Simpson’s Unreliable Sources: How the 20th Century Was Reported is published by Macmillan (£20)
Dr Priyamvada Gopal University Senior Lecturer in English Literature I highly recommend Neel Mukherjee’s recently published A Life Apart (Constable and Robinson, £12.99), which has won one of India’s most prestigious literary prizes. From Calcutta to London, and from Oxford and East Anglia, we are drawn into the intersecting tales of lonely foreign students, migrant workers, English governesses, colonial administrators and rich Arab businessmen in a tale that spans decades and countries without sacrificing intensity and depth. I’m also looking forward to reading the Orange-Prize-shortlisted The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Pocket Books, £7.99), by Monique Roffey, another tale of migration, secrets and changing times. Also on my list is Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton University Press, £15.95) by Martha C. Nussbaum, which seems particularly topical in these difficult times for higher education and the humanities in particular.
Allison Pearson (Clare 1978), newspaper columnist I like to pack a mix of current and classic. For anyone still wondering what the hell those bankers did with all our money, try John Lanchester’s deliciously excoriating Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (Allen Lane, £20). Amanda Craig’s Hearts and Minds (Abacus, £7.99) is a riveting portrait of modern London, which has the moral heft of the great Victorian novels married to a dancing mischief that are Craig’s trademark. Finally, my best holiday read ever was Mary Renault’s 1958 bildungsroman The King Must Die (Arrow, £8.99). Set in ancient Greece, the novel is almost hallucinatory in its recreation of the early life and adventures of Theseus. Sex, violent death and bull-leaping in Crete, all from the safety of one’s own sunlounger. Perfect relaxation! I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson is published by Chatto (£12.99).
Dr Terri Apter Psychologist and Senior Tutor at Newnham I’m looking forward to reading David Willetts’ The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – and How They Can Give it Back (Atlantic, £18.99). I’ve written as a psychologist on the difficulties young people today have in making the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and Willetts’s thesis, that babyboomers are hoarding wealth and land at the expense of their children’s generation, provides an exciting complement to my psychological approach. Another book I’m looking forward to reading is Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages and Wellbeing (Princeton University Press, £16.95) by George Akerlov and Rachel Kranton. I expect this book will confirm my sense that fantasy plays as large a role in our financial behaviour as does rationality. Even before Alan Greenspan announced to an amazed world that, oops, CAM 60 41
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his economic model was “flawed”, economics was transforming itself from an ideology of rationality to observation of human behaviour. As a psychologist married to an economist, I find this new balance enormously pleasing. Terri Apter’s book, What Do You Want from Me? Learning to Get Along with In-Laws, is published by WW Norton (£18.99)
Dawn Airey (Girton 1981), Chief Executive of Channel Five The Lessons (Viking, £12.99) by Naomi Alderman is an ironic choice maybe, as this is a novel set in and about Oxford University. I started to read the book with a cynical eye after listening to a biting critique on Radio 4’s Front Row, but was pleasantly surprised. It could be accused of being sub-Brideshead Revisited (the anti-hero is an alcoholic homosexual with a complicated relationship with his mother and the narrator is pathetically smitten with him). But these men are drawn by a young female novelist, who is not as self-indulgent as her subjects. There is sadness, madness and badness, but this is countered by redemption, warmth and compassion. The novel is not as elitist as the characters it portrays and it pleased me that my partner’s midwife noticed me reading it and remarked she had just ordered it on Amazon for her holiday reading.
Professor Richard J Evans Regius Professor of History German history, which is what I’ve specialised in for the whole of my adult academic life, isn’t exactly full of light or amusing reading. But there’s one book this year that is an exception to this rule and makes ideal summer reading for anyone interested in the subject: it’s Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern (Picador, £18.99), by Simon Winder. It’s a kind of historical travelogue, in which we go from one town or region to another, taking in German history in easily digestible chronological chunks along the way. Winder’s an enormously witty and entertaining writer, who crams his book with amusing anecdotes and often very funny descriptive passages. He manages to avoid the clichés that abound in so many popular books about Germany, and yet at the same time to be extremely, even eccentrically, British.
Diane Reay Professor of Education I think this is a particularly important time to refocus on issues of class and inequalities, especially as political parties talk in terms of hard times ahead and the need for cutbacks. All the historical evidence shows that, in times of economic stringency, it is the poor who suffer the most. I’d recommend Danny Dorling’s Injustice: Why Social Inequalities Persist (Policy Press, £19.99), an indictment of our political classes and their neglect of the disadvantaged in contemporary Britain.
Ben Schott (Caius 1993), author On the whole, if someone says they recommend an experimental novel, I raise an eyebrow. But as a writer I’m interested in ways of presenting information, and the book I’d recommend is a work of genius. Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is a rare example of an astonishing idea executed faultlessly. It’s a novel – a love story – presented as an auction catalogue, and tells the story of a relationship by the objects to be auctioned. Someone gave me a copy, and I read it in one sitting - I still can’t work out how she did it. Schott’s Original Miscellany is published by Bloomsbury (£10.99)
‘On the whole, if someone says they recommend an experimental novel, I raise an eyebrow’ Professor Richard Hunter Regius Professor of Greek Given that I am what my children would call a very sad person, the summer reading I’m most looking forward to involves very old books, rather than new ones. One current project is a book on Plato and ancient literature, and so I have a perfect excuse to spend long days re-reading some of the most extraordinary and puzzling texts in Western culture, which explore fundamental questions about what kind of society we want and what the role of the individual in it should be. Plato and Homer are always good company on a beach, and they are easily accessible in excellent translations, like Robin Waterfield’s versions of Plato’s Republic and Symposium (Oxford University Press World’s Classics, £6.99).
CAMCard holders receive a 10% discount on all book purchases at Heffers in Trinity Street, Cambridge and online at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/camcard
Robert Bathurst (Pembroke 1976), actor One holiday read will be The Cobras of Calcutta (Pan Macmillan, £12.99) by Grant Sutherland – the first of a series of stories set in 18thand 19th-century India. It’s of interest partly because various of my ancestors were involved with the East India Company, some more honourably than others. I will also be reading The Cracked Bell (Constable, £8.99) by Tristram Riley-Smith, an anthropologist’s take on American society, which has ruffled feathers in the salons of Washington. The author has had a unique insight into American life and his fond but critical analysis has been decried as antiAmerican, mostly by people who haven’t read it. He isn’t with them but he’s not against them. CAM 60 43
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Right to reply: Heroes frozen in time Julian Dowdeswell, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, says that to label Scott 'incompetent' (CAM 59) is to misunderstand the man and his achievements.
I
write as Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute and as a scientist who has worked extensively in the polar regions over the past 30 years. I should say, at the outset, that the Institute is a centre of internationally known research into the science, social science and governance of the Antarctic and Arctic. We also house the world’s most comprehensive polar library, and our collections of documents, artefacts, photographs and works of art are definitive in terms of recording the history of British polar exploration and early scientific investigations at the poles. The Institute was founded in 1920 with the residue of the Mansion House Scott Memorial Fund, and remains a national memorial to Scott and his four companions, Bowers, Evans, Oates and Wilson, who died on their return from the South Pole in 1912. While it was pleasing to see CAM magazine using photographs from the Institute's collections to illustrate the recent article, and for me to be able to project some of the scientific achievements of Scott’s two Antarctic expeditions, I do not feel that the suggestions that Scott was ‘an inept polar explorer’ and that he was ‘nothing but an incompetent fool’, are justified. Scott’s two Antarctic expeditions, aboard Discovery in 1901-04 and Terra Nova in 1910-13, were both organised explicitly to achieve the twin goals of geographical exploration and scientific research on the then little-known southern continent. The first expedition was, in fact, sponsored jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society, confirming these two aims. It has always seemed to me that the attempts by some to juxtapose Scott and Amundsen, and to imply failure and success as measured only by primacy in a crude and to some extent contrived ‘Race to the Pole’, is to miss much of the point concerning Scott in particular. It is certainly the case that Amundsen was a consummate expert in polar travel, but it is equally the case that the sole aim of his expedition was to reach the South Pole and return home. Science was simply not on Amundsen’s agenda, while it was clearly central to the planning and execution of both of Scott’s Antarctic expeditions. One only has to look at the extensive ‘Discovery Reports’ to see many examples of the contributions to
‘Research findings from Scott’s two expeditions are still quoted in today’s scientific literature’ our early scientific understanding of Antarctic geology, glaciology, biology, meteorology and other disciplines that derived directly from Scott’s expeditions. Indeed, research findings from Scott’s two expeditions are still quoted in today’s scientific literature. It is difficult, in this context, to see Scott simply as an ‘incompetent fool’. The Centenary of Scott’s last expedition, aboard the Terra Nova, will be marked by a series of exhibitions in Cambridge and elsewhere. The Institute has spent the past year on an ambitious programme of redesign and refurbishment of its own Polar Museum, which is the only dedicated museum of this kind in the UK. The theme of our new exhibition is ‘exploration into science’. This is a particular reference to the dual contributions
to both geographical discovery and scientific research that were the hallmark of Scott’s Discovery and Terra Nova expeditions to the Antarctic. The theme also projects the more general focus of the new museum displays, moving from the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, through the era of western exploration, into the present-day emphasis on the scientific understanding of the Antarctic and Arctic in the context of global environmental change. Our refurbished exhibition hall reopened in June 2010, exactly 100 years from the date that Scott and his companions left Britain for the South for the last time. The Institute is also contributing artefacts, documents and expertise to major exhibitions on Captain Scott’s expeditions and achievements at the Natural History Museum in London and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. These exhibitions will tour during the period of the Scott Centenary, 1910-13. I would encourage alumni who are interested in finding out more about the achievements of Scott and his colleagues to visit the Polar Museum on Lensfield Road from June 2010, for what I trust is a balanced and informative view of polar exploration and contemporary science. The recent book by David Crane (2005) provides a similarly well-balanced biographical account of Scott’s achievements and his flaws – we all have both. The biography by Sir Ranulph Fiennes (2003) provides a more robust account of Scott’s expeditions and their interpretation. These contributions provide some balance to the views of Scott portrayed in parts of the recent CAM article. The legacy of Scott’s two expeditions is an important one in both scientific and wider terms – there is simply no need to denigrate this legacy. The achievements of Scott’s expeditions, along with the wider history of polar exploration and the modern environmental significance of the polar continents, will continue to be projected through the museum and outreach activities of the Scott Polar Research Institute. References Scott of the Antarctic by David Crane (Harper Collins). Captain Scott by Ranulph Fiennes (Hodder & Stoughton). www.spri.cam.ac.uk CAM 60 45
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Sport: Cuppers Athletics Eammon Katter, hurdler & sprinter
For more information about the Cambridge University Athletics Club, visit www.cuac.org.uk
Interview Sophie Pickford
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o stress, no nerves, just fun – that’s the aim of Cuppers athletics. The first competition after the long summer break, run by the University Athletics Club, eases Cambridge’s various runners, discus throwers and hurdlers back into their chosen sport, gently reintroducing the concept of training to those who spent the summer on a beach or in an office, and giving those who’ve never had the opportunity before a chance to try out different disciplines. Victory brings glory to your College, failure prompts a consolatory pint in the pub. There’s no Varsity-level perfectionism here. Athletics may not have the mass appeal of rowing or rugby but the Cambridge club is old and prides itself on its history and traditions. It is inclusive and open and views the Colleges as a talent pool from which to fish for Varsitylevel athletes. Cuppers is a part of this process: 17 events run on one day in October and it’s open to all athletes, regardless of ability or experience. CUAC organises the event, but people just come down and have a go, there’s a great vibe and everyone is welcome. The Chariots of Fire effect may inspire some to don their running shoes, but others are just curious, and still others are looking to be talent-spotted by University captains for a place in the Varsity squad. I came late to the Cambridge athletics scene having competed at an inter-school level in my native Australia. So Cambridge was a fresh start for me and, after a term of settling in, my search for a new challenge led me to the door of the University Athletics Club. They were searching for a 400m hurdler and tentatively suggested I give it a go. Competition for Varsity places is usually cut-throat; the club aims to match people with the right event early in the season. Perhaps it was my long legs, perhaps it was their desperation, but after a long summer of training and competing I was presented with my team ribbon and given a coveted place in the squad. Last year I captained the St Edmund’s College team. Though one of the smaller colleges, we managed to collect half a dozen runners. Some had run at school, some wanted to test old injuries, others just wanted to give it a go. Each competitor is placed in a division to suit their abilities so no one feels out of their depth. It’s a very supportive atmosphere and there’s always good applause for everyone, no
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Charlie Troman
“
matter how slowly they’re going. The set-up can seem quite daunting: starting blocks, painted track and lycra are all pretty foreign to anyone who hasn’t competed before, but we make an effort to put people at ease and everyone goes away having had a good time. Some people choose to continue training together afterwards and, though the event is taken lightly, it builds a collegiate rapport that’s very important amongst students. Out of the 23 colleges in the men’s Cuppers competition last October, Eddies came ninth with 60 points; not a bad result, though there’s room for improvement. King’s won with 171 points and the last-placed colleges accrued only one point each, which gives you a sense of the breadth of involvement. To be honest it’s not really about the points anyway. It is, admittedly, a contest, but it is much harder to work up a competitive spirit against a fellow
Cambridge student than it is against an Oxford student. We are essentially all in the same squad at the end of the day and it’s a great way of meeting new people in your college. For those who shine at Cuppers, great things can follow. Last year a nervous fresher turned up saying she’d done a little bit of long jump at school but wasn’t particularly confident and really wasn’t sure she ought to be there. She went on to jump an extraordinary distance and was immediately recruited by the women’s captain for the University squad. She not only won the event for her College but also became a key player in CUAC. And that’s the beauty of the Cuppers system: it’s one of the few events at Cambridge where Colleges meet and compete across the board, it gives everyone a level playing field (no pun intended) from which to prove themselves, and an opportunity to have a go at something new.”
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Final grid entries corresponding to the asterisked clues can be paired to form anagrams of a sequence of names, with one missing. To achieve this solvers must change one unchecked letter in each pair of the corresponding answers, forming new words. Corrected single letter misprints in the definitions of 15 clues in order, followed by the unjumbled 3 down spell out the thematic position. Half of the clued answers are to be entered in reverse and all thematic names consist of two words (one hyphenated). The missing name can be formed from the final letters in the shaded squares and this must be written below the grid. Chambers (2008) is recommended, but only gives 10 down in conjunction with its direction.
Halfback by Schadenfreude CAM 60 Prize Crossword
PERIMETER (CLOCKWISE) 1* Bill’s rustic vehicle carrying odd characters from Looe (6) 6* Fluid volume goes in or fits in a hollow (9) 16* Experienced soldiers inspect set up trap (8) 42* Lawyer and king head an unpleasantly wet state (8) 43* Scrap sent back with old mixed cloths (7) 38* Girl’s tame bird keeping close to aviary (5) 20* Cook with trouble returning jars (5)
Missing name:
The first correct entrant drawn will win a copy of Nicholas Chrimes’ Cambridge: Treasure Island in the Fens and £30 to spend on Cambridge University Press publications.* There are two runners-up prizes of £35 to spend on CUP publications.* Completed crosswords should be sent to: CAM 60 Prize Crossword, CARO, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge CB 5 8AB. Please remember to include your contact details. Entries to be received by 3 September, 2010.
Solution and notes to CAM 59 (Undertones) crossword
Winner: Henry Blanco White (King’s 1974) Runners-up: Nesta Thomas (Newnham 1965) Andrew Johns (St John’s 1966) * Excluding journals
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Solutions will be printed in CAM 61. Solutions and winners will be posted online at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam on 13 September 2010.
ACROSS 10* Gods are protecting very great singer (4) 11 River bridge in the centre of Leon (4) 12 Adult books stored in house conservatory? (6, hyphenated) 13* 250 imprisoned by judge returning soon (6) 14 Fine fish fondue (4) 15 Nobel prize-winning chemist and ditto (6) 17 Swedish girl with new son— they can bring tears to Jock’s eyes (6) 18 Quiet Sue, uninitiated with false bust (7) 20 Bust restricting independent girl (6) 22 Rebellion finished retreating subaltern (6) Answers to the thematic clues are the colours of the lines on the London Underground map: BLACK, BLUE, BROWN, GREEN, GREY, LIGHT BLUE, MAGENTA, ORANGE, PINK, RED, TURQUOISE and YELLOW given in alphabetical order. The clue letters replace the names of the lines formed in symmetrically disposed cells by parts of across and down answers as follows: 1 PICCANIN/DILLYBAG, 12 CIRCAR/PADLE, 15 CENTRUM/SACRAL, 18 METRONOME/ NEAPOLITAN, 22 VICUNA/PRETORIA,
24* Moon over academy in grey November (5) 27 Wrongly apprehend schoolgirl keen to be stripped (6) 29 Cancer starting to travel further in (6) 30* Copies redone with ordinary spread (7) 32 Part of a water pump engineers can advance (6) 33* Spoil playful cat (6) 36 Phone company cut back representation (4) 38 Muscle examination away from the mouth (6) 39 Rector captured by some very nasty travellers (6) 40 Temperature check over belt (4) 41 Young shoot extremely meagre after cold year (4) DOWN 2 Poet doesn’t start to pay (4) 3 See preamble 4* Length of a chopped up pine (4) 5 Roofing material left in building site (5) 6 Name four men (4) 7 Herein is carbon and silver (4) 8 Soldiers on the French borders (5) 9* Prayers for the dead Poet Laureate (outstanding man) (7) 10* Learned army officer pursued by Scottish hooligan (6) 13 Mile journey east (4) 18* Amusing judge, turned fifty (5) 19* Snow level up (4) 21 Republican to follow deceptive plan (4) 23 Gas irritated the young baby (7) 25 Enter mint carrying returned English money (6, 2 words) 26* Having a sly look, man on board stifles an expression of fright (7) 28 Welsh girl forgets new drill (4) 31 Cause injury to something like a crayfish (5) 32* Mary’s frisky colt (5) 34 A branch overturned a heavy wagon (4) 35 Retired gentleman pockets my tips (4) 36 American moves some hidden evidence (4) 37* Northern demigod beheaded a cruel tyrant (4)
25 SUGARBAKER/LOOSE, 32 JUBILANCE/ AGLEE. 37 CINEAST/LONDONESE, 40 TILTHAMMER/SMITHIES, 45 NOREEN/LEATHERN, 47 DIETS/RESTRICT, Bottom Corner MAHWA/LANTERLOO. Extra words in clues are: “am” 13, “pussy” 46, “and” 7A, “city”11 giving & CITY which follows both HAMMERSMITH and WATERLOO. The East London line has been recently closed and will reopen as part of London Overground.
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Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 60 Easter 2010
In this issue:
In defence of Hall The first 100 days of coalition An idler’s idyll Subterranean secrets Alison Richard: first lady Summer reading