Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 66 Easter 2012
In this issue:
Ways of connecting Sport and luck Shelf lives My Cambridge Brainiac’s delight
CAM/66
Contents
CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 66 Easter Term 2012
Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collection. © Tate, London 2012
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Letters Don’s diary Update Diary My room, your room The best... My Cambridge In the margins Secret Cambridge
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Review University matters 39 Summer reading 40 Music 45 Sport 47 10 Prize crossword 48 11 12 15 16
Features Lara Harwood
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Regulars
Ways of connecting
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When Robert Macfarlane set out from Cambridge to walk the old ways, he began to trace a network of paths – and thoughts – that weave their way across the British landscape.
Shelf lives
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The UL is both repository for physical books – a new delivery of printed matter arrives every week – and curator of knowledge. Lucy Jolin explores the romance of the library.
Sport and luck
Charlie Troman
22 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 Relations Office. The opinions expressed in CAM are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the University of Cambridge.
Editor Mira Katbamna Managing Editor Morven Knowles Design and Art Direction 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 332288
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.
Editorial enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760149 cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk
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In this Olympic year, CAM asks: is success in sport down to perspiration rather than inspiration – or does luck play a far greater role than participants and spectators might imagine? Alumni enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760149 contact@alumni.cam.ac.uk www.alumni.cam.ac.uk www.facebook.com/ cambridgealumni @CARO1209 #cammag
Charity begins at home Dr Emma Mawdsley says that the rise of China and India is changing the way the world looks at international aid and development.
Advertising enquiries Tel +44 (0)20 7520 9474 landmark@lps.co.uk 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. Cover: Tabatha Leggett outside Fitzbillies. Photo by Steve Bond. Copyright © 2012 The University of Cambridge.
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Gold Award Winner 2010 Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year Award 2010
A moving story
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Why do we have a brain? Professor Daniel Wolpert says there is only one plausible explanation: to produce adaptable and complex movements.
CAM 66 01
EDITOR’S LETTER
Your letters
Among the stacks
W
elcome to the Easter edition of CAM. Even if you have never browsed its stacks, the University Library plays a central role in Cambridge life, and never more so than in Easter Term. On page 22, we wander the corridors to discover why libraries continue to be places of enchantment as well as learning. Back at CARO, the team are looking forward to welcoming the 3,743 new CAM readers who have fought their way through exam term to get to General Admission, Graduation Dinner and, for many, the start of life beyond Cambridge. On page 39, Gordon Chesterman, director of the Careers Service, explains how for many graduates, life after Cambridge begins on Mill Lane. On page 34, Professor Daniel Wolpert explains why he believes the human brain evolved to support motion, and on page 12, three alumni reveal what it is like to man the phones for Linkline, the University’s listening service. Dr Emma Mawdsley argues that international aid is not just about a flow of money and resources from the developed to the developing world on page 30, and on page 40, Dr Robert Macfarlane makes the case for hodology – the study of roads and routes. Lastly, at CAM we have been boggling at the sheer determination it takes to get from untried amateur to honed international athlete. Cambridge graduates have taken part in every Olympics since 1896. We celebrate the achievements of past medallists and follow the journeys of this year’s crop of hopefuls in our special Olympic pull-out, and present a debate on the role of luck in professional sport on page 26. We hope you’ll enjoy them both.
Mira Katbamna (Caius 1995)
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The Questing Beast I was surprised by one of the statements made by Julian Allwood [Debate, CAM 65]: “The total output of all photovoltaic cells yet made is probably less than the energy used to make them”. What source has Dr Allwood used that differs from the many studies I’ve seen? This NREL study, for example (www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/354 89.pdf) shows energy paybacks of one to four years, against lifetimes for PV of 25 years or more. “If we really want to address the serious harm from climate change,” as Dr Allwood states, I think that being as clear as we can with facts will really help. Jamie Vollbracht (Emmanuel 2000) Dr Julian Allwood states that using solar energy to generate electricity would require huge areas of land, and that the energy used to produce photovoltaic (PV) cells exceeds their energy output. He is incorrect on both points. Growing biofuels to burn to generate electricity would indeed take up land. However, there is ample space available on rooftops to do it with PV systems. Their production involves only a small fraction (maybe 10% in the UK case) of the energy and carbon that they generate. See, for example, Fthenakis et al, 2008, who found that electricity generation using PV would displace 89% of emissions from conventional power plants. Dr Steve Plater (Clare 1972) The recent article in CAM by Dr Julian Allwood was timely and interesting. I spent much of my working life [on] fibre-reinforced polymer structures. With these it is possible to place the reinforcement where it is needed and fabricate
the artefact with minimum waste, themes which Dr Allwood explores. Unfortunately the question we usually met was “will the product be cheaper than something made from conventional materials?” I suspect that today’s world is much the same. Neil Hancox (King’s 1959) Dr Allwood responds: “PV installations have grown at 40% per year since 2000, so with anything over two year’s payback, the article’s correct. Estimating 10m^2 of roof each gives ~50W each, ~1% of our energy requirements.” To read his full response and join the debate, visit alumni.cam.ac.uk/ news/cam.
The end of the world In a 55-year writing career, HG Wells had an awful lot to say about the end of the world, so it’s a pity that Professor Lisboa, in her interesting article, should misunderstand his views so badly. What Wells argued for was not the obliteration of “inferior races”, but for the notion of race at all, envisioning a world state that did not recognise as significant individual differences in nationality or ethnic origin. While I wouldn’t want to argue for this outcome as desirable either, it’s worth noting that Wells’s views on eugenics were decidedly more liberal than those of contemporaries such as Churchill or Beatrice Webb. Dr Simon James (Peterhouse 1989)
Lost youth As a teacher, I found a lot of what Professor Katz [CAM 65] said rang very true. There is a great tendency for both parents and children to feel that all activities should be purposeful, rather than
We are always delighted to receive your emails and letters. Email your letters to: cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk
Don’s Diary
Write to us at: CAM, Cambridge Alumni Relations Office, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB. Please mark your letter ‘for publication’. You can read more CAM letters at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam. Letters may be edited for length.
just for enjoyment; they expect learning to be directed towards a specific outcome, rather than for interest or mental stimulation. Where, then, will be the room for intellectual curiosity? I cannot agree with Prof Katz that “extended school hours” would provide any sort of solution, however. The sort of parents to which she refers will be forcing their children to partake of whatever they deem the most suitable “enrichment” or “creative” activities provided therein – and then no doubt taking them for their swimming classes, violin lessons or private tuition after that. Cath Brown (Newnham 1985)
Michael Ramage is a University Lecturer in the Department of Architecture and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex.
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aster Term is both exhilarating and excruciating. Exhilarating, because as an examiner for Architecture, I get to evaluate student work. Excruciating, because the students I have taught (as a lecturer and Director of Studies) will take the exam I have written.
Will they succeed as I hope? Or will they stumble on question three, which is a bit tricky? Did the supervisions stick? Was it worth climbing to the top of King’s College Chapel to discuss the architecture, the structure, the construction and the view? (It’s the best view of Cambridge that I know, and you can learn a lot about the growth of the city from the arrangement of the buildings.) I hope so, because it’s the highlight of the year for me: a chance to communicate the excitement of learning new things, even from a building that’s more than 500 years old.
I found Professor Katz’s article a little surprising. My own observations of 20-year old skateboarders, 30-year old yo-yo champions, youths riding tiny BMX bikes on public paths, young people staying with their parents into their thirties and forties, and the decreasing popularity of marriage and parenting would not resonate with the theory offered. Surely we are suffering from a chronic state of lost adulthood? Of course, Marx is never wrong because his ideas are versatile enough to fit any empirical reality, but I think he might still agree with me that the subjugation of society into a game-playing, toy-collecting crèche of permanent children is a far more effective form of hegemony than that suggested by Professor Katz. Kevin Leighton (Churchill 1988)
Cambridge was not yet a city; that wouldn’t happen until 1951. Queens’ College was completing the Dokett Building – site of the College's first bathrooms, and possibly more important from a student point of view, indoor toilets. (Of course, what interests me about the building is its early use of reinforced concrete in the floor slabs. Perhaps there’s an exam question to uncover there.) Meanwhile, Sidney Sussex was just finishing its new chapel. It was designed by TH Lyon, who later designed the war memorial chapel at King's – one of the many interconnections of Cambridge architecture.
When all in education are being accused of “dumbing down” – including university entry criteria – I think it a little unfair. But when I look at next year’s entrants massed behind Professor Cindi Katz on the cover of the Lent 2012 edition, I am not sure! Peter Benner (Downing 1956)
It’s these connections that make architecture interesting and challenging for our students. They work hard on their portfolios, presenting graphically not just their designs for form of buildings, as many suppose, but also the arrangement of the internal spaces, how those spaces relate to one another, how the building relates to its surroundings, and the way in which many details and materials come together in a satisfactory manner.
Speaking of age, this Easter Term is particularly special because we are celebrating the Architecture Department’s first century. The first architecture lecture was given by Edwin Prior, Slade Professor of Fine Art, in May 1912. Although people often think of Cambridge as unchanging, the first architecture students who were starting 100 years ago were studying in a very different kind of town.
Our students approach this in different ways, of course – architecture is about imagination, intellect and practical application coming together, and each student brings a different focus and set of interests to the task. But our students spend many late nights putting the finishing touches on their designs, made only slightly easier by the extended hours of sunlight as winter gives way to spring. Seeing the results is always a highlight of my term. Teaching the practical aspect of architecture is also a pleasure. Making things with one’s own hands has a special reward, and I try to do it as much as possible with my students. This term, a particular standout was the Eco-House Initiative – a student-led project to design, critique and build houses in the developing world, working with a large Latin American NGO. The students raised an impressive amount of funding from the Anglo American Group Foundation, and part of the money has gone towards building a full-size prototype in the garden of the Architecture Department. Over the course of a weekend, a complete house, constructed from panels fabricated offsite a few days earlier, appeared outside my office window. It stayed up for two weeks as its environmental performance was measured, and there are even rumours that some students slept in it to assess its comforts. It was a remarkable achievement, and all the more impressive because the project does not count towards exams. Closer to home, just north of Cambridge in Waterbeach, students have designed a bridge to cross one of the many Fenland drainage ditches, in a project in partnership with the Woodland Trust. It will be made of coppiced timber cut from the trees around the site. Later in the summer, a few students will return to Cambridge to build the bridge. If we can manage it, we’ll also plant some willow – which, over the next few years, we can grow into a bridge. A fitting way, I think, to welcome the next 100 years.
To join the celebrations, visit www.arct.cam.ac.uk CAM 66 03
UPDATE EASTERTERM Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
SPORT
Cambridge at the Olympics
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ne minute you’re trying not to get hit in the Lent Bumps, and the next you’re representing your country at the Olympics. Or at least, the electrifying progress of many of Cambridge’s Olympic hopefuls makes it seem that easy – though we understand that quite a lot of training has to go on in between. As we go to press, more than 20 Cambridge students and alumni are hoping to compete at London 2012, including 10 rowers, four runners, three fencers, a heptathlete, a cyclist, a diver and a sailor. You can follow their journey to the Olympics in our special CAM London 2012 guide, and online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/Olympics. Here, you’ll discover more about Cambridge’s extraordinary roll call of more than 300 Team Olympians (dating Cambridge back to the beginning of the modern Games in
The CAM guide to the student and alumni athletes hoping to compete at the London 2012 Olympics
Light Blues row to victory 1896), get daily updates on our Olympic hopefuls and read about the future of sport at Cambridge. Of course, sport at Cambridge is as much about taking part as it is about Olympic gold medals, and we want to hear all your stories – whether they’re of sporting tragedy, or triumph or the thrill of taking part in London 2012. Share your sporting memories and experiences, from Cuppers to winning a Blue, and from carrying the Olympic torch to working for LOCOG or helping as a Games volunteer, at our website.
Daily Mail/Rex Features,Getty Images
Top right: Olympians and brothers Laurie and Reggie Doherty (both Trinity Hall). Bottom left: Ran Laurie (Selwyn 1933). Bottom right: Tom James MBE (Trinity Hall 2002).
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The Light Blues rowed to victory in the 158th Boat Race – the most dramatic contest in many years. Cambridge won the toss, and chose the Surrey station. By the Mile Post, Oxford were leading; but 10 minutes 30 seconds in, a swimmer in the water forced the umpire, John Garrett, to stop the race. Twenty minutes later, the race was restarted; and after 35 seconds, a clash resulted in Oxford’s six-man losing his blade. Cambridge won by four-and-a-quarter lengths. Earlier in the day, in the reserves race, Isis (Oxford) beat Goldie (Cambridge) by five lengths. At Henley, Cambridge triumphed in the 68th Women’s Boat Race and won the Lightweight Men’s trophy, while Oxford were victorious in the women’s lightweight and reserve races. But for the first time in 11 years, Cambridge were crowned overall winners, taking the Francombe Cup for the Victor Ludorum.
Five new alumni groups
Royal Society – New Fellows
Alumni groups can be found all over the world. The latest five groups are in Bulgaria, Valencia, Montenegro, Burma and Libya. To find out more, visit alumni.cam.ac.uk/groups
Six Cambridge academics are among the 44 new Fellows to be announced by the Royal Society this year. They are: Professors Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman, Tony Kouzarides, Margaret Scott Robinson, Mark Warner and Daniel Wolpert.
UPDATE EASTER TERM
ENTERPRISE
New scheme for start-ups Cambridge is launching an investment scheme to help support new companies based on University research. The initiative, which combines a Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) with an Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) fund, will enable individuals to invest in start-ups linked to the University. “While well-established Cambridge spin-outs have been very successful in attracting funding, the lack of access to early-stage funding is a major concern,” said Dr Anne Dobrée, Head of Seed Funds at Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm. “This scheme is an excellent way for alumni and friends of the University to invest in Cambridge start-ups and be a part of the success of the Cambridge cluster.” Visit www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk for more information.
UNIVERSITY
Farewell Peter Agar ARCHIVE
Vatican reveals Cambridge papers
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selection of 100 documents from the Vatican Secret Archives includes an original copy of the Papal Bull addressed to King Edward II, granting papal recognition to the University of Cambridge. It was written in Avignon, where the popes resided for much of the 14th century. The parchment is in perfect condition. The entry in the leatherbound register – dated 13 June, 1318 – states that Pope John XXII accedes to the King’s request the previous year for Apostolic protection of the new University. Pope John, “observant of the fact that the prosperity of nations rests in the abundance of learned men… the advice of the wise, and the deeds of the strong” prays that “the University of
Cambridge may flourish... in every academic discipline” and grants the right to Cambridge graduates to teach “everywhere”. The original, according to the Vatican, was deposited in the University archives in Cambridge, where it remained until the 15th century, but is now considered lost. The Secret Archives were begun under Pope Paul V, a Borghese family aristocrat who had been educated as a lawyer in Perugia and Padua before coming to Rome. Their nucleus was his donation to the Church of his own family records. This year, the Vatican is celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of the archives in 1612. David Willey, BBC Rome correspondent (Queens’ 1953)
This term saw the departure of Peter Agar, Director of Development and Alumni Relations. The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, said: “Peter Agar has provided outstanding leadership on fundraising and alumni relations over the past 10 years. “His success in completing the 800th Campaign a year ahead of schedule and 20% ahead of target and his creation of the award-winning Cambridge Alumni Relations Office are extraordinary achievements.” Working closely with the previous Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dame Alison Richard, Agar won University approval for a significant investment in alumni relations, which included a complete redesign and relaunch of this magazine. The revitalised CAM subsequently won the Robert Sibley Award and the CASE Grand Gold Medal in 2010 for the best alumni magazine worldwide – the first time that these prestigious awards had been given to a University magazine outside the United States. Peter Agar was appointed in January 2002, having previously been UK Consul General in Toronto and Director of Trade and Investment for Canada (20002001). Prior to that, he was Deputy Director General of the CBI (1994-2000). CAM 66 05
UPDATE EASTER TERM
Honorary graduates The honorary doctorate is the highest award the University can confer. This year, eight people will be so honoured. They are: Lord Judge of Draycote, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales; Dr Brigitte Askonas, immunologist; Professor Uta Frith, developmental psychologist; Professor Sir Richard Gardner, physiologist; Professor Peter Higgs, theoretical physicist; Professor Roger Tsien, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry; Professor Phillip King, sculptor; and Alfred Brendel, pianist.
Four new masters Visit Sri Lanka with the Alumni Travel Programme.
Four Colleges – Darwin, Caius, Emmanuel and Magdalene – have announced new Heads. At Darwin, Professor Mary Fowler, currently Dean of Science and Professor of Geophysics at Royal Holloway, will become the sixth Master, succeeding Professor William Brown. Caius welcomes the distinguished chemist Sir Alan Fersht, who is currently at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He will be the 42nd Master of Caius, succeeding Sir Christopher Hum. Dame Fiona Reynolds, currently DirectorGeneral of the National Trust, will succeed Lord Wilson of Dinton to become the 27th Master of Emmanuel. At Magdalene, Dr Rowan Williams, currently Archbishop of Canterbury, will be returning to Cambridge to become the 35th Master, succeeding Duncan Robinson. Dame Fiona Reynolds
ADVENTURE
Alumni Travel Programme
C Regius Professor of Physic A new Regius Professor of Physic has been approved by Her Majesty The Queen to succeed Professor Sir Patrick Sissons, who retires in September. Professor Patrick Maxwell is currently Professor of Medicine and Dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences at University College London. His research programme, focusing on the transcriptional control of genes by oxygen, has received substantial national and international recognition and has considerable potential for translation into new therapies for patients. 06 CAM 66
losed to the outside world for almost half a century, Burma is one of the most beautiful and magical countries in Asia – and Cambridge alumni now have the opportunity to travel there, in the company of an academic expert, through the Alumni Travel Programme. Now in its 20th year, the Alumni Travel Programme has crossed the globe. It has taken in archaeological digs in the Egyptian desert; the Galapagos Islands in the company of a leading expert on Darwin; and viewing the night skies over the Arctic Circle guided by a professor of astrophysics. This year, the Programme gains two new partner operators: Voyages to Antiquity, the award-winning small cruise company, and Andante, a small specialist tour operator owned and run by archaeologists. As well as offering a unique way to take part in the intellectual life of the University, the Programme helps to support Cambridge through a donation from the partner companies for every booking.
For more information, download the Travel Programme brochure, Unbound, at alumni.cam.ac.uk/travel or contact CARO.
DIARY Festival of the mind Alumni Weekend, 21-23 September 2012 Want to know what really makes a difference to wellbeing in childhood? Why our nearest neighbour, the moon, continues to fascinate astronomers? Why it’s time to rethink the Great Irish Famine or why engineering and maths have got everything to do with art and nudity? For the answers to all these questions you need to get yourself to the ultimate festival of the mind: Alumni Weekend. This year, the festival will open with an exclusive reception at the Fitzwilliam Museum, giving you the chance to network and to view more galleries than ever before. Festival-goers will also have the chance to sing in King’s Chapel, to visit the University’s museums and many of its private gardens, and to hear from top academics from across the University on the issues that shape our world. Booking for Alumni Weekend opens at the end of July. Visit alumni.cam.ac.uk/weekend to join the mailing list and to book online.
Ben Hawkes/PVUK
alumni.cam.ac.uk/weekend
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DIARY
Forthcoming festivals
Other events
Alumni Weekend is just one in a series of festivals in Michaelmas Term, many of which are suitable for brainboxes of all ages.
Genetics Centenary Lecture Day
Chamber Music Concert
7 September Commemorating the centenary of the Arthur Balfour Chair of Genetics at Cambridge, this oneday symposium features lectures from the current Balfour Professor, David Glover FRS, Sir Walter Bodmer (University of Oxford) and Professor Chris Marshall (Institute of Cancer Research) among many others. Tickets cost £40 per person and include all lectures, refreshments throughout the day and dinner at Churchill College. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events
13 November Some of Cambridge’s finest young musicians perform at an exclusive concert for alumni. Enjoy drinks and canapés at this reception held at the stunning Robert Adam home of Mr Bob Boas (Corpus 1957) and his wife, in central London. Tickets cost £40 per person. cums.org.uk
Open Cambridge 7 – 9 September
Celebrate… Cambridge’s history, architecture, art and gardens with walks and events in the city. cam.ac.uk/opencambridge
Festival of Ideas 24 October – 4 November
Celebrate… the arts, humanities and social sciences through hundreds of inspiring talks, topical debates and hands-on activities for all ages. cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas
Winter Wordfest Treasures of Cambridge
27 November
Celebrate… the enduring pleasures of the written word at Winter Wordfest. It covers all genres with a fantastic variety of events for the entire family to enjoy. cambridgewordfest.co.uk John Hegley will be appearing at Winter Wordfest in November. Eamonn McCabe
8-15 September Explore the rich history and heritage of the city and University at a special week of events organised by Great St Mary’s. Includes exclusive access to otherwise closed areas of the University, candlelit dinners in the historic Colleges and events led by Cambridge experts. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events
Festive Drinks 10 December This popular annual event is becoming a firm favourite in the festive calendar. Network in style at this drinks and canapés reception held in the exclusive surroundings of Sir Paul Judge’s 18th-floor apartment, overlooking the stunning skyline of the City. This event is open to all alumni and their guests. Tickets cost £39 per person. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events
Save the date! Varsity Rugby at Twickenham 6 December
CARO E: events@alumni.cam.ac.uk T: +44 (0)1223 332288 W: alumni.cam.ac.uk CAM 66 09
MY ROOM, YOUR ROOM ROOM U2, NORTH COURT, JESUS
Words Stephen Wilson Photograph Charlie Troman Andrew Mitchell (Jesus 1975) is an MP and Secretary of State for International Development.
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Nicola Boekstein is a second year Natsci who says that if she could bequeath something to her room for posterity, it would be her rug. “It will always remind me of this room!” she says.
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ndrew Mitchell MP says that being back in his old first year room, U2, is strange, but wonderful. “I came here straight out of the army – literally direct from Brize Norton. I drove up with my four boxes of worldly possessions, unpacked and then lay on the bed. I remember very clearly lying here, looking at the tower of the church, and thinking ‘What on earth am I doing back in academia?’.” Back in 2012, current resident Nicola Boekstein is unsurprised to hear that U2’s somewhat retro furnishings haven’t changed since Mitchell’s day. “I came bottom of the ballot,” she confesses, “so there wasn’t much choice, but this was the nicest of what was left.” Boekstein loves the big windows and the view. “It’s so nice to lie in bed and look out,” she says. “It’s probably one of the best things.” Mitchell agrees, joking: “I also thought one of the best things about it was the view, but of course I enjoyed it sitting at my desk working very hard, as we all did in those days!” Mitchell remembers a large United Nations sticker above the door (which later proved impossible to remove), lots of books and a record player on which he
Regimental Sergeant Major West, the head porter, used to say to me, ‘All these loutish students! At least you stand up straight, sir’
THE BEST... BUN IN CAMBRIDGE Tabatha Leggett is reading Philosophy at Girton Generally speaking, sticky things are good. Glitter glue is good. Bubblegum is good. But most important, sticky buns are good. When it comes to sweet treats, I’m a firm believer that if you’re not licking your fingers and lips throughout the entire eating experience, something’s not quite right. And so, in an effort to escape exam-term blues and delay revision for as long as possible, I’ve been on the lookout for Cambridge’s best bun. Stickiness is, of course, the main criterion, and it’s a tough and exacting task, as I am sure you can imagine. Coffeeshop buns, for example, are notoriously poor. I can understand why someone would venture to Starbucks or Caffé Nero for a tasty treat in an attempt to overcome a Week Five slump in Lent or Michaelmas term – God knows we’ve all resorted to a cheeky almond croissant before a 9am supervision. But in exam term, mass-produced muffins just don’t fit the bill. You need something more. You need something more considered… something stickier. Patisserie Valerie is lovely, but only if you’re prepared to use cutlery. And I maintain that revision is complicated enough without the introduction of knives and forks. I love a strawberry tart as much as the next person, but the cream/custard/ jelly combination is too much to deal with at this time of year. So, for the perfect bun, you need something simple, something to the point. You need a Chelsea bun from Fitzbillies. There’s something special about the glaze on this currant and cinnamon bun – something so irresistible that I have begun to find it almost impossible to walk along Trumpington Street without popping in for a toothsome treat. At just £1.80, Chelsea buns won’t put you out of pocket, but they will stick your fingers together, make your lips sugary and have your friends queueing up to hand you a tissue. Chelsea buns are so sticky that they don’t fall apart when you bite into them. And so even though dissertation deadlines and exam timetables are making everyone around you fall apart, you can tuck in, safe in the knowledge that this, at least, will maintain its shape. Just make sure you wash your hands after eating one, because sticky revision notes aren’t good.
Steve Bond
played Bob Dylan, Supertramp and Van Morrison – but most of all, he remembers the porters. “Having arrived straight from the army I had very short hair, stood up straight, and the Head Porter – Regimental Sergeant Major West – used to say to me, ‘All these loutish students! At least you stand up straight, sir’. By the time I had been in Cambridge six months, my hair was long, I slouched – I was such a disappointment to him. He was a wonderful man.” Boekstein, has also got to know the porters rather well, but for a quite different reason. “All the locks on our doors have just been changed, so they lock automatically behind us. And it took quite a while to get used to,” she confesses. “I ended up locking myself out of my room three or four times a day and the porters had to let me back in!” Is U2 is a good room for parties? Mitchell remembers having a particularly good time in May Week. “About 20 of my friends in College came along with a bottle. My sister had come up a day earlier and slept on the floor, and after my party we went off to another party, and then to another,” he says. “When she went back to London, I remember she looked at me at the railway station and said, ‘You are in paradise here’. And it sort of was, really.” As for other activities, Boekstein says that she’s been keeping busy helping to organise ents for the Jewish Society ball, but as a Natsci, her life is fully timetabled. “Students today are much more diligent than we were,” Mitchell says, “because in those days you didn’t have to worry about unemployment. In my last year I went to very, very few lectures.” Instead, Mitchell, who read History, says that he remembers bicycling midmorning to the Seeley, and to the UL. “I’d go with every intention of sitting down and working, but I’d end up bumping into someone and going to have very good scones in the UL tearoom!” Mitchell also spent time at the Union (where he served as President) and stood for election to the University’s Conservative Association. “There were eight places and I tied for bottom place. Under the constitution you had to draw straws, and I won, which was absolutely outrageous because Jon Baker was much more experienced than me and much better able to contribute to CUCA,” he says. “I remember walking through the snow to St John’s to have dinner and thinking, ‘This is fantastic, to be in Cambridge, in the snow, and to have won an election on the toss of a coin’.” But other than electoral success, what would he bequeath to future inhabitants of U2? “Oh it would have to be a piece of music – probably Dylan, I should think. The late nights here echoed to ‘Lay Lady Lay’.”
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MY CAMBRI DGE
It’s good to talk Next year, Linkline, Cambridge’s free, confidential and anonymous listening service, turns 40. But what is it really like to man the phones? Three alumni tell their stories. Ed Roberts (Christ’s 2004), read Natural Sciences. He is now a junior research fellow specialising in cancer and is finishing off his PhD.
Alisha Fuller-Armah (Magdalene 2004), read History of Art and Social Anthropology and stayed on to do an MPhil in Social Anthropology. She now runs her own business, Hummingbird Hall, a boutique wedding destination in Jamaica.
Interviews Becky Allen Illustration Andy Potts
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Lizi Foan (Girton 2007), read Natural Sciences. She now works in pharmaceutical publishing for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
ED ROBERTS Looking back on my time at Linkline, I realise it was quite a privilege. It gives you this window into a person’s life because of the things they share with you. I really valued that, and seeing the positive results you could get: that people went away feeling so much happier or had worked something out for themselves made me feel good. I volunteered for Linkline for six years, from my second year as an undergraduate and then for all four years of my PhD. I did it because I felt it would be nice to give something back. I had seen people here being quite stressed out and thought Linkline was a really important service. Cambridge is a stressful place. There are lots of different support mechanisms, but sometimes it’s difficult to speak to someone face-to-face or to someone you know; so an anonymous, confidential service like Linkline can be very powerful. The big issues are always quite shocking, but the calls I remember most are the ones where someone
phoned up and just said they were really lonely, that they’d tried everything but just hadn’t made any friends. With the “bigger” issues – if someone calls because they think they’re pregnant – they start thinking about their options and in the end come away with some sense of a way forward. Whereas someone who is just really lonely will often talk around it, say thank you, but you know they haven’t come away with any resolution. I found that really hard. Linkline gave me a healthy view of the importance of talking about problems. I’ve learned to listen well, and how simply listening can help people come to a stronger resolution. I’m now a volunteer with Cambridge and District Community Mediation Service, which provides free mediation in neighbour and workplace disputes and to young people and their families. I wanted to keep developing the skills I’d gained at Linkline and it’s an interesting set of new challenges and a really interesting process, seeing it work. Sometimes you can facilitate these amazing turnarounds. ALIS HA FULLER-ARMAH I had some of the most interesting conversations at Cambridge through Linkline. During shifts you’re very focused when you’re on the phone, but when you’re not it’s a great opportunity to meet people doing different subjects. Some of my shifts I shared with a PhD student doing research on dinosaurs, and we had conversations I’d never have had otherwise. I volunteered throughout my four years at Cambridge. We were meant to do four or five shifts a term, although because I was the head of the women volunteers, I’d often do extra shifts, sometimes several a week. Sometimes Linkline worked as a respite from studying, but looking back, I wonder how I fitted in my academic work. We would take books in during exam time, but that was often the busiest time on the phones. It made me aware of the different sides of Cambridge. It’s easy to sail through your time there – it can be a picture-postcard place – but there’s an unhappy underbelly that can be easy to ignore. Rape, abuse, bullying – like anywhere else, it all happens. So volunteering with Linkline grounded me. There are two types of calls. The first is the crisis call: people wanting someone to speak to at that moment, a listening ear. Talking through things helped ground people and allowed them to make calmer decisions. The second type of caller was just lonely. They’d call us like friends for a chat and tell us about their families and how they were doing. We gave them a more normal experience of Cambridge. We’d develop some sort of anonymous rapport, and some callers phoned throughout their university careers. There’s less resolution, but that’s why Linkline is such an important service. Sometimes people would call you back when things went well: people you’d spoken to who were thinking about dropping out would call to tell you they’d graduated. Those calls were good. And the training I had for Linkline made a big impact on me. Being able to be nonjudgmental has helped me in later life. Judging people doesn’t help; that’s stayed with me. I’m Jamaican and moved back when I graduated to set up my own business. But I’d also like to try and establish something like Linkline island-wide in Jamaica. There’s poor mental health here – struggle and stress – and Jamaica lacks listening services.
The big issues are always quite shocking, but the calls I remember most are the ones where someone phoned up and just said they were really lonely, that they just hadn’t made any friends
LIZ I FOAN I volunteered for a year, in my third year. A friend was being interviewed for Linkline and although you’re meant to keep it secret, she told me about it. I had heard of it – seen the posters – but hadn’t thought of volunteering before then. I volunteered, too, because Cambridge is such a crazy place to be at university, and so stressful at times, that Linkline is such a needed service. It’s great for people to have space to talk. Because of the time Linkline operates – in two shifts from 7pm to 7am – it never clashed with lectures or practicals. And in terms of getting work done, it was very flexible – you could always swap shifts or take work with you. Lots of people aren’t necessarily calling for a solution but to let off steam, or because they don’t want to burden their friends or be judged by them. Because it’s anonymous, you can talk completely openly; irrespective of the problem, there is someone there to listen. Linkline doesn’t direct. It’s not there to offer advice or convince you to think in a particular way. It’s a listening service; people are free to talk and come to their own conclusions. You know callers are going to be distressed. I knew I was there to help but I didn’t take things personally, and I didn’t take things with me when I left the office. I rarely had calls when people didn’t feel better at the end, even if the problem wasn’t resolved, so I felt I made a difference. The training you get is absolutely fantastic. You get two days’ training in teams, doing role play and looking over case studies. Having been a Linkline volunteer has helped me at work and in my personal life. Going into the world of work with more experience of dealing with different people and personalities is really helpful. Having developed ways to cope with difficult situations – dealing with callers who might be aggressive or demanding more from you than you can give – makes it easier to handle these things in everyday life. And if people are struggling, I feel I can be a better friend. The training sets you up. You’ll use it day-to-day even if you don’t realise it. And the people you volunteer with are great, I came away with some really good friendships through Linkline. It was such a positive experience that it’s made me keen to volunteer again in future.
Linkline will turn 40 in 2013, and would like to get in touch with alumni in time for a reunion celebration. If you would like to be added to an alumni mailing list, please email alumni@linkline.org.uk
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NOTES IN TH E MARGIN
James Joyce. Artist. Banker. Words Mandy Garner Paul Slater, after Magritte.
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n the margins of the last draft of a 1906 letter to the publisher who reneged on a deal to put Dubliners into print, James Joyce remarked that he needed a publisher who would be willing to take a risk. At the time, Joyce was 24, working in a bank in Italy and keeping a notebook about the world of commerce. “The additions in the margins – which include several mentions of the word risk – seem to reveal that the language of banking was seeping into Joyce’s thoughts,” says Jaya Savige, a Gates Cambridge Scholar whose research focuses on the rise of the concept of risk in modernist literature. “You can see the convergence of the language of finance and his own youthful formulation of his artistic project and sensibility.” Savige’s interest in the emergence of modern ideas about risk in literature stems from a line at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus declares himself willing to take the risk of exiling himself from the church and his homeland in order to become an artist. “It struck me that a question lingered there. What was Dedalus risking? And what is the relationship between risk and art and literature, especially in an age dominated by the concept of risk?” he says. The fact that Joyce worked in a bank for six months is little known, and Savige says that his banking notebook tends to be underexamined because what he is writing about appears relatively bland and uninteresting. “Unlike the creative notes in his other notebooks, these are straightforward notes about banking,” says Savige, pointing out that this reading ignores the fact that Joyce is writing at a time when the debate about social insurance and the extent to which the state is responsible for a person’s welfare was just beginning. The world of high finance has also played a part in Savige’s own academic pursuits. When he was deciding what to study for his PhD, the global financial crisis was in full swing. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, he felt compelled to study something that was relevant to the global situation; and he found a link to the present in Joyce’s transposition of the financial concept of risk into modernist literature. “Joyce is the great literary harbinger of our contemporary risk society,” he says. Savige believes that the industry formed a background for Joyce’s future literary works – most obviously in Ulysses, where the former insurance agent Leopold Bloom is constantly thinking about the insurability of the individuals he encounters. The mythical maritime risks that Odysseus faces in his voyages are transplanted into early 20th-century industrial Dublin, and the very format of the book – which is famously difficult to read – forces the reader to feel at sea, just as Odysseus was. “The reader has to navigate textual and literary risks, and this is something that is emblematic of modernist
Unlike the creative notes in his other notebooks, these are straightforward notes about banking
literature,” says Savige. “In this way, Joyce extends the application of the concept of risk from something that is merely about narrative content to the form of the novel and literature. “Sociologists like Ulrich Beck believe Western society has undergone a profound shift since the 17th century, when the concept of risk first emerged, to now, where a large proportion of the decisions we take on a public and personal level are made on the basis of risk analysis. I believed that this idea of risk analysis must be reflected in the literature of the period – and lo and behold, it is.” CAM 66 15
SECRET CAMBRIDGE:
MONUMENTAL MUSHROOMS Words Becky Allen Images Charlie Troman
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t is as if a pair of monumental mushrooms have erupted through the floor. Comprising curvaceous, silver-grey aluminium caps supported by chocolatebrown ceramic stalks, it’s an object that would be as much at home in Tate Modern as in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy (DMSM). Look more closely at its sculptural form, however, and the object’s function begins to be revealed. Hidden under the cap of the right-hand mushroom are a series of dials labelled with embossed tape. “Emission,” reads one. “Filament,” “deflectors,” “lens” and “voltage” say the others. 16 CAM 66
I think it’s architecturally magnificent as well as being very important scientifically. It’s a bit like a Henry Moore
For all its beauty, this bit of secret Cambridge is not a work of art, but a scientific instrument, and a piece of the University’s technological heritage. Built in the 1960s by the Swiss firm Haefely, it is a Cockcroft-Walton generator – a direct descendent of the device these two Cambridge physicists invented to split the atom 80 years ago. “I think it’s architecturally magnificent as well as being scientifically very important,” says Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, director of research at DMSM. “The highvoltage electron microscope that it supplied electrons to was, at the time, absolutely world-leading.” A fan of its pleasing proportions and the craftsmanship of its construction, he finds the generator every bit as attractive as great sculpture. “You can walk round it and get different perspectives. It’s a bit like a Henry Moore,” he explains. “It’s a beautiful piece of scientific sculpture.” Although Humphreys himself never used it, he remembers it being built in the mid-1960s when he was a research student at Cambridge. And it’s thanks to him that this generator has survived. After it passed out of service in 1985 and the building housing it was taken over by Social and Political Sciences during the 1990s, Humphreys discovered the generator was destined for the scrapheap. “I thought this was vandalism, and approached Estate Management to save it,” he recalls. “They told me I could have it if I took it apart myself and removed it from the building at no cost to them! “I was head of the Materials Science department at the time, and got three technicians to dismantle it. They numbered all the parts and reassembled it in the reception area of the Austin Annexe. It was a dark and dingy place and the Cockcroft-Walton generator transformed it.” The first version of the generator was an icon of the atomic age. Designed and built by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the one-million-volt generator or particle accelerator enabled them in 1932 to split the atom in a controlled fashion for the first time. It was a landmark for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951. Its legacy lives on. The clever combination of capacitors and rectifiers that allows the CockcroftWalton to generate such high voltages means they are still used as the first stage of many modern particle accelerators, from Fermilab to the Large Hadron Collider. And tiny versions of the Cockcroft-Walton sit in most of our homes, according to Ernest’s son Dr Alan Walton, also a physicist at Cambridge. “The circuit is at the heart of every television set ever made,” he says. “We used to joke with Dad that if he’d taken out a patent on it, we’d have been as wealthy as the Gettys. Rolling in it!” That his father was capable of constructing such a thing came as no surprise. “He was very gifted in those ways,” Walton explains. “We always regarded him as capable of doing anything with his hands.” His projects included making a liquidiser for his wife from an old vacuum-cleaner motor, an upturned saucepan, a set of rotating blades and a glass goblet. (“The glass goblet was the only part of it he bought,” Walton adds.) Like Humphreys, Walton loves the generator, and hopes it will be preserved when DMSM moves to its new building at West Cambridge.“In the world of theoretical physics it is often said that fundamental equations, for example E=mc2, are beautiful,” he says. “In the world of experimental physics, many of the great experiments have an elegance to them that is missing in lesser studies. The Cockcroft-Walton generator is a joy to the eyes.”
WAYS OF CONNECTING
Painting Wood on the Downs by Paul Nash
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ne hundred and one summers ago,the poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917) set out to walk the Icknield Way – the ancient track that runs south-west from the sands of central Norfolk to the chalk of the Chilterns. His route took him through south Cambridgeshire, and he found the county’s flatness both dispiriting to traverse and fascinating to contemplate. It was, he wrote in a brilliant flourish, “very simple country… that might have been moulded by a strong north wind when the land was docile as snow”. The “tall chimneys of Cambridge”, which he glimpsed across six miles of “fine open corn-land”, showed as striking verticals in the insistently lateral landscape. For crossing the county, though, he advised “elephant, camel, horse, mule, donkey, motor-car, waggon… anything except… a pair of hobnailed shoes”. It was an unusual recommendation from a man who, from a young age, was a compulsive walker and wayfarer. Thomas possessed a pair of what John Keats once called “patient sublunary legs”, and those legs carried him along thousands of miles of old paths, from the famous (the Ridgeway in southern England, Sarn Helen in Wales) to the local lanes around his South Downs home. Holloways, drove-roads, green lanes, coffin-routes, pilgrim-paths, Neolithic tracks – Thomas followed them all, and paths came to thread subtly and vitally through his writing.
Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collection. © Tate, London 2012
When Robert Macfarlane set out from Cambridge to travel the old ways he stepped into a network of paths – and thoughts – that stretched across the British landscape and its waters, linking them to the continents beyond.
Having made his reputation with a series of travelogues and natural histories, Thomas at last began writing poetry in the winter of 1914, at the age of 36. In an astonishing late outpouring of art, he finished 142 poems in just over two years: poems that changed the course of modern English poetry, and whose branch lines are being followed still. Some continue to be widely known and loved – Adlestrop, As the Team’s HeadBrass – and many took paths, tracks and walking as their central metaphors. Thomas died on Easter Monday 1917, the opening day of the Battle of Arras: killed by a passing German shell that sucked the air from his lungs, stopped his heart and threw him unmarked to the ground. His war diary, a document remarkable for its serenity, suggests that more poems would have followed, had he survived the conflict. Four summers ago, I set out from Cambridge to walk the Icknield Way, following Thomas’s route and carrying with me his account of his journey. I had become interested in his work, and also in the broader relationship between walking, thinking and writing. It seemed to me that this was not a subject that could be researched by sitting still, and so it turned out. That first walk began a book that would take four years, 1,000 miles and 100,000 words to complete; and the Icknield Way proved my entry point to a network of old routes of travel that stretched across the British landscape and its waters, and connected them to continents beyond.
Surprisingly, there is a word for people who study roads and routes: hodologists, from the Greek hodos, meaning “path” or “way”. Once I started looking with a hodologist’s eye, I began to see paths and tracks everywhere, in culture as well as landscape
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Chalk Paths, Ravilious, Eric (1903-42) / Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library
started on Cambridgeshire chalk – and found my way to the dolerite bird-islands of the Scottish north-west, to the granite of the Cairngorms and the Spanish Guadarrama, the limestone of the West Bank (where a small group of Palestinians walked old paths as protest against Israeli land control) and the glaciers of the sacred peaks of the eastern Himalayas (around which Buddhist pilgrims calmly made their koras or circumambulatory pilgrimages). I researched trespass and access, song lines and ley lines, rights of way and rites of way. Everywhere I went, I encountered men and women for whom landscape and walking were crucial to life. I met pilgrims, tramps, trespassers, dawdlers, mourners, stravaigers, explorers, cartographers, poets, sculptors, activists, botanists – and a man who believed he was a tree and that trees were human. I discovered that walking was still profoundly and widely alive as a more-than-functional act: a vital means for people to make sense of themselves, to express resistance or civil disobedience, to gain knowledge that would be otherwise inaccessible, to seek joy or to encounter grace. Surprisingly, there is a word for people who study roads and routes: hodologists (from the Greek hodos, meaning “path” or “way”). Once I began looking with a hodologist’s eye, I began to see paths and tracks everywhere, in culture as well as landscape. They wind their ways in particular through an unexpected amount of English art and literature. They are there as the dusty roads followed on foot and horse by the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales (which Chaucer began writing 650 years ago), there in Dorothy Wordsworth’s sharp-eyed journals, there in the prose of William Hazlitt (who walked radically, making marches from chapel to chapel to hear Unitarian ministers preach, and acclaiming footpaths as “lines of communication… by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive”) and in the cosmi-comic ramblings of the long-distance tramp George Borrow, who ignited the wayfaring cult of late-Victorian Britain. They are there, too, in the poetry of John Clare – who wrote his scrupulously attentive poems about the Northamptonshire landscape, and praised footpaths as “rich & joyful to the mind” – there in the painting of John Constable, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer, the music of Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and the photography of Fay Godwin and Bill Brandt. Many of these artists share an interest in how walking and thinking are mutually involved, and how paths might offer means not only of traversing space, but also of feeling, being and knowing.
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Nan Shepherd, in her slender masterpiece The Living Mountain (written in the 1940s and first published in 1977) described how she came to know the Cairngorm massif on foot, following its ridge lines and deer tracks for years until she found herself walking not “up” but “into” the hills. Walking was essential to her method; bodily sensation enabled highly specific kinds of knowledge and vision, and encouraged an openness of encounter and an immediacy of experience. “My eyes,” wrote Shepherd beautifully and simply, “were in my feet.” The walking artist Richard Long – who once walked a shattering 33 miles a day for 33 days, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, creating an artwork nearly 1,100 miles long, with the landscape his medium and his feet the incising pen-nib, pencil-lead or brush-tip – signs off his letters with a red-ink Chinese-style stamp that shows the soles of two feet, each of which has an open eye embedded in its centre. Many of these artists have also been inspired by the sense that time is experienced differently while walking old paths and tracks: that it might fold or pleat in strange ways, bringing discontinuous moments into contact, and creating historical correspondences that survive as territorial imperatives, ghostly multiple exposures or spectral voices. Walking, in this tradition, becomes an act of archaeology or of séance. Edward Thomas wrote in his poem Aspens of hearing, at the cross-roads of a path, the “clink, the hum, the roar… the whisper” of a vanished village. In Thomas Hardy’s novels, stretches of a path can carry memories of a person, as a person might of a path. The English downlands were, to John Masefield, “thronged by souls unseen / Who knew the interest in me, and were keen / That man alive should understand man dead.” One February afternoon, I received a phone call from a friend, telling me that a set of Mesolithic footprints had been discovered on the intertidal mudflats at Formby Point near Liverpool. I caught a train to Formby, and arrived in time to walk the length of the footprint trail. That walk, no more than 30 yards and two minutes long, was the most extraordinary I have ever made. The prints had been left by a man and a woman, who some 5,000 summers previously had been strolling side by side, northwards along the foreshore at around four miles per hour. Their tracks had been pressed into the silt, baked hard by the sun, and then preserved for five millennia by the gradual deposition of subsequent layers of mud and sand. They had been exposed by the scouring action of a strong tide two days before I saw them, and a day later they had vanished, erased by the waves. Walking alongside the tracks, I also passed the slots of red deer and roe deer, the glyphs of cranes, and a gaggle of smaller human prints: children, mud-larking while their parents foraged, centuries before the first Egyptian pyramid was built. The uncanniness of the experience was not one of time-travel (a sudden whisking back to the Mesolithic) but rather an eerie feeling of co-presence between the ancient and the current. My research had begun in Cambridge, and it brought me back to the city in unexpected ways. In the Hereford Library archives, in a ribboned bundle of papers fetched from an iron-doored strongroom, I found a map from the 1930s, hand-drawn in red and black ink on sheets of tracing paper, and showing the supposed existences of an ancient ley line running from Avebury in Wiltshire to Midsummer Common in Cambridge. The map was the work of a member of the Old Straight Track Club, an organisation founded by the intriguingly lunatic Alfred Watkins in the 1920s (Watkins later authored a littleknown 60-page book on the Archaic Tracks of Cambridge, which explained how to hunt leys in and around the city). Eventually, too, I returned also to the Icknield Way and to Edward Thomas. The poet imagined himself in topographical terms. Landscape gave form to his melancholy and his hopes. Paths connected real places for him, but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. These traverses – between the conceptual, the ghostly and the personal – occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. Walking was to Thomas a means of personal
myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings: he not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them. I realised that to write adequately about Thomas, I needed to approach him not biographically but, as it were, bio-geographically: to re-tell his life and thought through and in terms of the landscapes by which he understood himself, and also to re-walk the paths he had followed. “The hill road wet with rain,” he wrote finely in a late poem, “In the sun would not gleam / Like a winding stream / If we trod it not again.” Thomas is undergoing a revival at present. He has been the subject of an excellent recent biography by Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France. Oxford University Press is issuing his selected prose in six vast and meticulously edited volumes. This coming winter, Richard Eyre will direct at the Almeida in London a play about Thomas’s friendship with the American poet Robert Frost, which developed while the two men were “talks-walking” (Frost’s phrase) together in the Gloucestershire countryside. Thomas always was modern before his time. Now, as we prepare to fight the Great War over again in memory, he and others like him have things of value to tell us about how we imagine our relationships with landscape and nature, how paths run through people as well as through places, and the surprising worth of the ways we walk.
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton) is published this month.
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Far left: Kieran Hammond, first year English Literature student, Homerton “I’m researching how the use of gloves in Shakespeare relates to contemporary discussions on chivalry.”
Shelf lives Words Lucy Jolin Photographs Charlie Troman and Marcus Ginns
‘The library didn’t only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to the shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren’t also dangerous just because reading them didn’t make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain.’ Soul Music by Terry Pratchett
Right: Research Associate, Sanskrit Manuscripts Project, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies "This is a Nepalese manuscript from 1645, containing a collection of Buddhist legends called One Hundred Stories of Glorious Deeds."
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Left: Chris Bell, Chief Library Assistant, Legal Deposit Department “Unpacking our weekly delivery from the Agency of the Legal Deposit Libraries each delivery brings plenty of surprises.”
Right: Sue Adams, Masters student in Genealogical, Heraldic and Paleographic Studies at the University of Strathclyde “For my thesis, I’m combining genealogical sources like the census with tithe maps, to figure out where people owned land.”
Far right: Mark King, second year PhD student in Medieval History, Pembroke “These are several volumes of the Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society.”
Yes, a chance encounter over a book about Dostoyevsky did indirectly lead to my marriage...
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t is 1912 and a normal working day for the staff of the Cambridge University Library. As they do every week, crates of printed matter have arrived for their perusal: the Legal Deposits After putting aside the academic material, staff sort the books, magazines and papers by size and put then into cardboard boxes. These are not important state papers, the diaries of a well-known novelist or learned academic journals. Rather, they range from The Victor Rapid Record Selector (“to help you choose your records more expeditiously and with greater satisfaction”) to The Scholar’s Catechism on Arithmetic and General Knowledge (typical entry: “What is a gamp?”). In 1934, these boxes of apparent rubbish – but which must be kept, by law – are moved to the new UL building. They are put in the Tower, where they stay until 2006, when a new academic and popular interest in the minutiae of 19th-century life helps to spark the Tower Project. By the end of this year, Tower Project researchers will have catalogued all books in the tower published up to the end of 1920. They are a treasure trove for historians – a perfectly preserved record of reading. These books, leaflets and magazines were not important then. But they are now. It is just one reason why libraries matter: they exist for the past, the present and the future. The boxes still arrive at the UL: more than a hundred of them every week, containing around 1,600 books and 1,500 periodicals. Who knows what the readers of 2112 will make of them? Each consignment is a snapshot of whatever happens to be published in the UK that week – everything from Java for Dummies to Spot’s First Walk.
“Which will remain in perfect condition,” says Marjolein Allen, Head of Reader Services. “No child ever gets to chew our Spot books. This material is not something we’d buy as an academic library. But it is part of our heritage, so we look after it for ever – we never throw it away.” But libraries are more than simple depository. They exist in our imaginations and memories as much as they do as places of serious academic endeavour, as Nick Langley (Fitzwilliam 1974) and still a regular UL user points out. “As a red-brick grammar-school boy, I found the University environment of the mid-70s pretty alien – which may have been partly warranted, and partly because of a chip on my shoulder,” he recalls. “The waits after you’d filled in slips and before the librarians brought your books seemed horribly long, especially to someone feeling hyper-self conscious and out of place, surrounded by people who seemed to fit in. I wonder how many of them were feeling just the same? I still use the University Library regularly, and have been struck by how helpful they are now.” The Library evokes nostalgic memories for Dom Banham (Clare 1987). He says: “I was once wandering around the UL and found a section filled with books on the history of firework making, complete with contemporary engravings of firework-related incidents – often the untimely and explosive demise of a famous factory. “None of this was in the least bit helpful to whatever purpose I had originally gone there for, but I have still vivid memories of reading some fascinating accounts.” And they are more than just information hubs. “Libraries are intriguing, important, delightful, controversial places with wonderful pasts and interesting CAM 66 23
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Right: Henrietta McBurney Ryan, Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art, Eton College “I am looking at the two-volume set of Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.”
Far right: Reverend Brian Mastin, affiliated lecturer with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies “I’m consulting the Persepolis Fortification Tablets - texts from the Persian Empire, written in Elamite - for various grammatical features.”
Above: Bodil Isaksen, third year undergraduate in Land Economy at Queens’ “I am revising development economics for my finals.”
Left: (From left to right) Deborah Farndell, Senior Conservator; Shaun Thompson, Bindery Supervisor and Lucy Cheng, Book and Paper Conservator, who says: “I’m working on fragments that are part of the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection, a treasure trove of more than 7000 Jewish manuscripts.”
futures,” says Professor Simon Franklin, of the Department of Slavonic Studies and Head of the School of Arts and Humanities. “But it doesn’t do to be overly sentimental about them. I think that we can no longer get by with a slightly cosy notion of libraries. Yes, I went to the local library as a child, there was story time on Saturday and that was very important and exciting. Yes, a chance encounter over a book about Dostoyevsky did indirectly lead to my marriage. But people have so much more access to so much more information in so many different ways now. The time when the library was the only access to the world of knowledge is not there any more. It would be foolish to pretend that it was.” However even in the future, there will still be the dusty boxes. He says: “The digital zealot notion – that libraries are going to be completely redundant, that we will simply have everything on a handheld device and all these great buildings can be converted – is turning out to be equally misguided. It’s a utopian or dystopian vision of the future which is as off-centre as the overrosy view of the past.” So the argument over whether the smell of old books trumps the feel of a shiny new Kindle is long over. Why not have both? These days libraries such as the UL are at the forefront of marrying print and digital, using the one to complement the other. Take the recent project by the UL to digitise Sir Isaac Newton’s papers. The digital archive received 29 million hits in its first 24 hours online. ‘For the first time in the Library’s history,” says Anne Jarvis, University Librarian, “we do not know who our readers are. We do, however, have extraordinary new opportunities to engage directly with a worldwide audience. Communication remains critical, but it now takes different forms. We inform our readers
through social media and they increasingly access our catalogues and collections online. This is therefore a very exciting time for the Library and its staff.” And the fact that Google can now pull up Newton’s archive actually strengthens the case for libraries. The reason why those documents can be made available online is that they have spent the last 400 years being carefully cherished and preserved – in a library. (In fact, many papers were so delicate that they needed to be restored before being digitised.) “Nobody else has that responsibility,” says Professor Franklin. “Not Google, not Wikipedia, not governments. Nobody else has to think in those long terms.” The digital, he points out, is an adequate substitute for the object, “but it should never be mistaken for a total substitute. If we look at our screens, we assume that everything is the same size and texture, and that a manuscript miniature is exactly the same as an enormous mural because it all fits on to your iPad. And objects are important not just as holy relics – though there’s an element of that – but if one is talking about serious knowledge, rather than just information about something, then one has to work with the objects themselves.” And it is those objects that remain at the heart of the library, for all the undoubted convenience of an online catalogue of more than eight million cards and the lure of shiny screens. “Occasionally, you find a book which has been in library since the 19th century and it’s just the book you need, and you open it to find that nobody has even cut the pages,” says Professor Franklin. “One might say, what an extraordinary waste to have a book there that nobody is going to read for another 150 years. On the other hand, what a wonderful justification – suddenly, this book has meaning.” CAM 66 25
DEBATE:
SPORT &LUCK In this Olympic year, CAM asks: is success in sport is down to perspiration rather than inspiration – or does luck play a far greater role than usually assumed? Interviews Lucy Jolin Illustrations Paul Slater LUCYJOLIN: It was legendary golfer Gary Player who first shrugged off the role of chance in his success with his famous maxim: “The harder I practise, the luckier I get.” So let’s start by defining luck. It’s a slippery concept… DAVID SPIEGELHALTER: Unpredictability is a fact of life. Sometimes we can narrow the odds and take some control, but there’s always a margin left over which is not in our control, in any way. If it turns out well, people call it luck. Luck is just a retrospective label that people give to unpredictable things that happen to go their way. But as soon as you start talking about luck, people start thinking that it’s some kind of external force that’s guiding things, and I think that’s absurd. ED SMITH: Why does it have to be an external force? It seems to me that you’re grouping luck and fate together. To me, they’re very different. Fate is fixed. Fate is something that you career towards, a destination – luck isn’t.
Ed Smith (Peterhouse 1995), author of “Luck: What It Means and Why It Matters”, is a journalist and former international cricketer. David Spiegelhalter is the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the Cambridge Centre for Mathematical Sciences. Mark de Rond is a Reader at the Judge Business School, a Fellow of Darwin, and the author of the upcoming book “There is an I in Team: What Elite Athletes and Coaches Really Know about High Performance”.
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DS: So what is luck? ES: Well, if you look at games of chance,
you may have a winning streak, you may not. That seems to be luck. It’s not ridiculous to admit that or to conceive that. DS: Of course – that’s how probability works, in runs. Runs of events happen much more often than is intuitive. If you flip a coin and you get four heads and four tails in a row, that seems strange, so people think they are having runs of luck. This is how probability works in the real world – in very unintuitive ways. We are so desperate for a sign, some kind of understanding, that we start giving these labels to things when it’s just chance. MARK DE ROND: I like to think about luck in terms of synonyms. People use luck and chance and serendipity interchangeably. In science and business, we often talk about serendipity, which is really isn’t about luck as much as it is about people being able to meaningfully combine observations that may not be causally related.
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We studied the role of luck in football. In the Premier League, the spread of points suggests the results are 21 per cent due to luck. But it changes the further down the leagues you get. In some years in Scottish League Division Two, it’s almost complete chance
LJ: And so do you think this force is a factor in sport? ES: Luck is a massive part of success in sport. I was
hearing a British Olympic sailor talking about luck the other day. He said: “I have to admit that whatever I do, the wind might be against me.” But most sportspeople shy away from acknowledging the role of luck, and that’s natural. DS: We studied the role of luck in football. In the Premier League, the spread of points suggests the results are 21 per cent due to luck. But it changes the further down the leagues you get. The amount of luck goes up and up and up. In some years in Scottish League Division Two, it’s almost complete chance. The variability at the end of the season is as if they just flipped a coin before the game to decide who wins, with 50 per cent chance of a home win, 25 per cent chance of an away win, 25 per cent chance of a draw. You can call it luck. I call it quantifying probability. LJ: So will the Olympic hopefuls be taking luck into account? MdR: You do find a surprisingly high amount of superstition among athletes. I suspect it is because they understand that not everything is under their control and that the margins are so small. When Adrian Moorhouse won gold for the breaststroke 100 metres at Seoul in 1988, he won it by a hundredth of a second. He was still behind when he was 44 strokes into a 45 stroke race. DS: There are aspects to every single situation – particularly sailing, I’m sure – which mean that the margins are so small that there is no way that the same person can be that consistent. ES: They’re going to be clinging to the idea that nothing is left to chance, and their training regime and their tactics and their approach are giving them the best possible chance of winning. But in the back of their minds there is some subconscious awareness that the best-laid plans can come unstuck very quickly. DS: They try to think they are in control of everything. But of course, they are not. There’s one Olympic final for each sport. What would happen if they did each final 10 times? It would get very tedious but I bet the same person wouldn’t win every time. LJ: But surely there’s an element of making your own luck, and fortune favouring the brave? ES: Well, you can’t make your own luck, because that’s an oxymoron. If luck is beyond your control, then whatever it is that you’re making may be very useful and very sensible but it isn’t making luck. You can put yourself in the way of luck, you can maximise your exposure to luck, but it’s not quite making your own luck. And even with “the more I practise, the luckier I get”, all Player’s really doing is getting more balls near the hole. Some are going to drop in, but that’s not actually luck. A better line would be “the more I practise, the better I get”. DS: When you say that someone makes their own luck, with practising and so on, that’s really just narrowing the odds, and that’s obviously what you try to do when you’re competing: make it so that the probability of your failing is lower and lower. We can improve the odds, but things are never going to be certain.
LJ: So what happens when we disregard the existence of luck? MdR: I think some people find the idea of luck quite helpful. It helps them cope with uncertainty. It might be the wrong thing to try and prove to people that it doesn’t work. The same is true of superstition. ES: I was in a team that banned luck. We had a meeting. We were going to be tougher, more relentless, more selfaware than anyone else. Someone said: “I get so tired of people saying ‘bad luck’ when someone’s out. It’s not bad luck, it’s just bad skill.” And the coach said: “That’s right! We’re never going to say bad luck ever again.” First game of the season, this guy hits a full-blooded shot, right in the middle of the bat, and the fielder took off – it was the most improbable event you’ve ever seen. He puts out a hand, he catches the ball almost by accident. The batsman trudges back to the dressing room and there was this deathly silence. And we played really badly. When the natural desire to control and minimise your exposure to chance is taken to ridiculous extremes, it actually becomes inhuman and self-defeating. DS: The naïve use of the Black-Scholes and other equations, which helped fuel the financial crisis, happened because people thought they could tame chance by having formulae. These are very efficient formulae – provided the world behaves exactly according to your assumptions; and the world isn’t always so obedient. LJ: And therefore it might be a positive thing to let go of control, to embrace luck… MdR: Yes – take Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. Alexander Fleming worked very hard, but he was also a messy person. It so happened that a microbe flew in through the window of his lab and landed on a culture dish. A microbe falls into a saucer – not such a great event. But for him to have noticed what happened to that microbe – it’s an interesting combination of him being both hard working and messy. And yet he was prepared enough to observe the unusual reaction on the dish. So it’s hard to exclude chance from that. DS: I like that. Things favour the prepared mind. ES: Previous generations of sportsmen were a lot more devil-may-care. And some did pretty well with that mindset. You also see people have a late flowering when, say, they’re about to get dropped, and sometimes that is because they just let anxiety go. They just go out there and have a go and express their skills and see what happens. That’s an underestimated mindset. It’s probably not optimal for your whole career, but at certain points in their lives people do throw caution to the wind and just play.
Follow the fortunes of Cambridge’s Olympic competitors at alumni.cam.ac.uk/olympics
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Dr Emma Mawdsley says that the rise of China and India is changing the way the world thinks about international aid and development. Words William Ham Bevan Photographs Marcus Ginns
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o the layperson, the general direction of international aid and development may seem as obvious as that of gravity: rich countries give to poor ones. But according to Emma Mawdsley, a senior lecturer at the Department of Geography, the reality makes for a rather more complex and intricate mosaic. “Many people tend to believe that it is only the Global North – the industrialised, developed countries – that give money to the South, the unindustrialised, developing ones,” she says.
“But what this misses is the huge, bubbling array of activity that has been going on for decades between South-South partners in all sorts of ways. Until about 2005, the role of these other countries was almost invisible to most Western policymakers, development professionals and academics of both mainstream and critical hues. I was as guilty as anyone of that.” Mawdsley’s work focuses on the large number of states outside the traditional Western donors as agents of international aid and development. These include the two giants of the Global South, India and China; regional powers such as South Africa and Saudi Arabia; nations undergoing accelerated industrialisation, such as Turkey and Thailand; and former Eastern Bloc countries including Poland and the Czech Republic. Nonetheless, one axis of development cooperation tends to dominate any discussion on the topic. “There is a problem that everyone gets obsessed with China, and particularly what China is doing in Africa,” she says. “I wrote a paper on this a few years ago, looking at how the British broadsheet newspapers portrayed China’s place in the continent. It’s very interesting: as soon as the Chinese were mentioned, the West’s role, past and presented, tended to be sanitised. “Even with authors and columnists who in other respects could be quite critical of some aspects of the West’s role in Africa, the moment China was in the picture, we were the good guys. It was a case of ‘We might have made mistakes in the past, but our colonial role was at least mixed. We were exploitative, but we were also concerned about their souls, and we brought peace and development. The Chinese don’t care about that, just the money’. These stereotypes – of the West and China – continue to shape people’s ideas of development relations today.”
CV 1989 Matriculated at St John’s College, Geography 1996 Commences PhD under the supervision of Dr Stuart Corbridge 2001 Fellowship at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs (CCEIA), New York, USA 2003 Lectureship and Senior Lectureship at Birkbeck College, University of London
Charity begins at home
2006 Lectureship and Senior Lectureship (2009) at Cambridge University 2011 Ron Lister Visiting Fellowship to the University of Otago, New Zealand CAM 66 31
Many such commentators have characterised the actions of China – together with such agents as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela – as using “toxic aid” to promote their own national interest at the expense of poorer countries. An opposing viewpoint, espoused by some activists and academics, is that any challenge to the aid cartel dominated by Western donors is to be welcomed. By this reckoning, it represents a longoverdue rebalancing of global power, offering recipient nations exposure to alternative approaches to economic growth that may well prove effective. Mawdsley believes that neither view constitutes the whole picture, and that a whole patchwork of ideologies, practices and outcomes must be taken into account – some positive, some less so. In the case of China, she points out that Western observers are apt to confuse instances of aid with those of trade, and judge them by the wrong yardstick. “We don’t, for example, confuse Shell’s investment in Nigeria with aid, and then hold them up as self-interested, manipulative aid givers. Both need to be judged in this case as corporations and businesses, not donors.” And there is evidence that Chinese investment is making a significant difference to some African nations. “A lot of what they’ve done is seriously impressive,” she says. “Whether we like it or not, they’re doing what a lot of Africans want. They’re often much better than we are at driving GDP growth and providing the big infrastructure – roads, power, jobs – for it. “What the West has done in the past 15 years has attempted to be progressive, looking at social indicators, health and gender; and all that is very important, but the West may have taken its eye off the ball in terms of the underlying engine of growth. The Chinese are helping to industrialise Africa in a way that 19th-century Britain was industrialised. “Now, we tend to think of development as this rather pleasant process, taking in gender empowerment and smiling children being given clean water. But development can be pretty ugly. It can be alienating and both ecologically and socially destructive. You can lose community, languages, cultures and environmental sustainability. And certainly, the Chinese are not particularly good at acknowledging that there are losers in the process, such as pastoralists, forest dwellers, fishing communities and ordinary working people.” However, it is the other leviathan of the Global South that has been a focus of Mawdsley’s work over the past seven years. India has calibre in development cooperation that stretches back to its first decade of independence, when it began to provide assistance for Nepal and Bhutan. Later work with Asia and Africa was couched in ideals of solidarity between Third World and Non-Aligned countries; and more recently, a booming Indian economy has prompted a greater emphasis on trade and investment, notably with the mineral-rich nations of west and central Africa. But, as Mawdsley explains, Indian development cooperation has always presented itself as different from the model practised by the West. The country has always rejected the idea that it is providing “foreign aid” – a notion that it associates with neo-colonialist interference in sovereign affairs. She says: “The dominant public discourse of foreign aid in the West, which is almost impossible to shake off, is that it is an act of virtue – an act of charity to the less fortunate. “That’s not a bad thing, but it locks aid into a
Many characterise the actions of China as “toxic aid” but Mawdsley points out that we don’t confuse Shell’s investment in Nigeria with aid, and then hold them up as self-interested, manipulative aid givers
problematic framing that then becomes quite hard for governments to defend – such as when you have people losing their jobs in Britain, a lot of hardship and cuts and so on. It also obscures the multiple ways in which we get something back for our aid. In India, the discourse is dominantly win-win, mutual benefit, solidarity and empathy rather than sympathy. I think that’s a much easier sell for their governments, and it is more appreciated by partner countries.” She has just completed a pilot study examining the public perception of such schemes within India and the results have proved interesting. “India doesn’t do a lot to publicise its development partnerships,” she says. “But a lot of Indians know, for example, that their country built the Afghan parliament building. They take pride in India’s external presence and profile. There’s a sense that India has made it and is becoming the powerful nation it always should have been, and that development partnerships can help to project that.” Mawdsley first came up to Cambridge in 1989, as a Geography undergraduate at St John’s. After completing her PhD, she spent a decade working at Durham University and Birkbeck, University of London. She returned to Cambridge in 2006, to become a Lecturer at the Department of Geography and a Fellow of Newnham College. She says: “I’ve always had two main strands of work: Indian environmental and regional politics, and then development politics more broadly. These came together a few years ago: I was doing some research and writing on China-Africa, and that bandwagon was already starting to roll quite fast. But my expertise was in India, and it occurred to me that people weren’t writing much about India-Africa.” A British Academy grant helped her to address this imbalance, and to bring a similarly minded colleague, Gerard McCann, to work on the topic in Cambridge. Their collaboration yielded a book on India in Africa, and she is now putting the finishing touches to a new volume, From Recipients to Donors: Emerging powers and the Changing Development Landscape. “Everything from international relations, political economy and cultural and anthropological theories has been deployed in this book, to look at donors as diverse as Hungary, Thailand, India and Brazil,” she says. The scope of the book sounds vast, I suggest. Mawdsley laughs, and says: “It’s ambitious, but one of the best things about geography is that we often see things in the round – it’s an inherently interdisciplinary subject. Nevertheless, I think there is still an image problem with geography. Most people labour under a rather old-fashioned view of the subject. When I describe my work, people are often fascinated, and say to me, ‘I had no idea that geographers did that’.” Certainly, her current work bridges many spheres of academic interest, and turns a whole raft of preconceptions about international development on their head. “The growing awareness of long-standing SouthSouth aid and development cooperation transgresses our conscious and unconscious categories and assumptions about who gives aid to whom: who ‘does development’. And in some ways, you could argue that development is the ultimate tool of superiority – ‘we develop you’. “It’s not that these other countries are never guilty of that, for all the rhetoric of South-South collaboration, equality, solidarity and partnership. So now we need to unpick their assumptions, politics and cultures – it is a whole new realm, almost untouched until five years ago.” CAM 66 33
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A moving story Essay Professor Daniel Wolpert
W Illustration Matthew Richardson
hy do we have a brain? Not all species on our planet have brains. So for neuroscientists, if we want to understand how the brain works, a fundamental question is why we evolved one. When I ask my students this question, they typically say it is to enable us “to perceive the world” or “to think”. But that is completely wrong. We have a brain for one reason only: to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other plausible explanation.
Professor Daniel Wolpert was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2012, and has recently received a Senior Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust to pursue his research. He is a member of the Department of Engineering.
If you think about it, movement is the only way we have to affect the world around us, whether it is in foraging for food or attracting a waiter’s attention. Indeed, communication – be it speech, gestures, writing or sign language – are all mediated through the contractions of muscles. While sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, they are only so because they either drive or suppress future movements. There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the colour of a rose if it doesn’t affect the way you are going to move later in life.
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As you can tell, I am a self-confessed movement chauvinist. I believe movement is the most important function of the brain, and to understand movement requires us to understand how perception, memory and cognition affect action. However, the effortless ease with which humans move – our arms, our eyes, even our lips when we speak – masks the true complexity of the control processes involved. This is evident when we try to build machines to perform human control tasks. While computers can now beat grandmasters at chess, no computer can yet control a robot to manipulate a chess piece with the dexterity of a six-year-old child. To understand brain processing could therefore lead to dramatic improvements in technology. In our group in the Department of Engineering we use theoretical, computational and experimental studies to investigate the computational principles underlying skilled movement in humans (we study undergraduates as a representative sample of human-kind). A major area of our research programme is to understand how the brain deals with the uncertainty inherent in the world and in our own sensory and movement systems. We only know about the world through our senses, but they provide information that is usually corrupted by random fluctuations (known as noise), which lead to variability in our perceptions. For example, if you put one hand under a table and try to localise it on top of the table with your other hand, you can be off by several centimetres. Moreover, when we act on the world through our movement system, the commands we send to our muscles are also corrupted by a variability that leads to movement inaccuracy. Or, as every darts player knows, trying to aim for the same spot over and over again leads to a large spread of the darts. Therefore, this combined sensory and movement variability limits the precision with which we can perceive and act on the world. Remarkably, society rewards those who can reduce their overall variability. If you can reliably hit a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick, the financial rewards can be enormous. However, it is not only society that cares about reducing variability. Our work has shown that the brain works hard at reducing the uncertainty and variability in its perceptions and actions. We have shown that our brains implement a branch of mathematics known as Bayesian Decision Theory. The fundamental idea is that you want to generate beliefs about the world – so what are beliefs? Beliefs could be “Am I looking at a cat or a fox?” or “Are my arms in one configuration or another?” And in the Bayesian world we are going to represent beliefs with probabilities – that is, with a number between zero and one, zero meaning “I don’t believe it at all” and one meaning “I am absolutely certain”, with numbers in between giving the grey levels of uncertainty.
The key idea to Bayesian inference is that you have two sources of information from which to generate beliefs. You have data – and in neuroscience, data is what we sense from the world. But there is another source of information – memory – which can give you prior knowledge. You can accumulate such knowledge throughout your life. And the point about Bayesian decision theory is that it gives you the mathematical tools to determine the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge and your sensory inputs to generate new beliefs. An intuitive example will be familiar to the average tennis player. If you want to estimate (generate a belief) about where the approaching ball is going to bounce, Bayes’ rule tells you there are two possible sources of information. There is sensory evidence – you can use visual information and sound information to make an estimate. However, as your senses are not perfect, there will be variability in where you think the ball is going to land, and you can assign a probability to each location. That is the information available on the current shot, but there is another source of information only available from repeated experience in the game of tennis: that is, that the ball doesn’t bounce with equal probability over the entire court during the match. If you are playing against a very good opponent, they may distribute it close to the edge of the court making it hard for you to return. Both these sources carry important information. And what Bayes’ rule says is that you can combine the sensory evidence on the current shot with your prior knowledge to make the optimal estimate of the bounce location. Indeed, in a similar laboratory-based task we were able to show that humans are Bayesian learners, meaning they represent the statistics of the outside world and know about the variability in their own sensory apparatus, allowing them to optimally combine prior knowledge and sensory evidence to generate beliefs.
But beliefs are of no use to us unless they drive actions, so the second part of Bayesian Decision Theory is the decision and subsequent action. There is a problem. Tasks tend to be symbolic – I want to drink, I want to dance – but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence. In fact, there is a big gap between the task and the movement system that could be bridged in infinitely different ways. For example, even in a simple arm reach there are in fact an infinite number of paths along which I could move my hand. Even if I choose a particular path, I can hold my hand on that path with infinitely different joint configurations. But it turns out that we are extremely stereotypical. We all move in pretty much the same way. So why is it that we move in the particular ways we do? In reality, perhaps we don’t all actually move quite the same way. Maybe there is variation in the population. And maybe those who move better than others have got more chance of getting their children into the next generation. So in evolutionary scales, movements get better. And perhaps in life, movements get better through learning. So what is it about a movement that is good or bad? We have shown that it is the variability in our muscle contractions that is critical to the choice of a particular movement. So when I want my arm to do something, there is a random component that perturbs my movement away from what I desire. However, it turns out that different ways of moving to the same final location engender different amounts of variability. Indeed, a model we developed which proposes we move in a way to minimise the negative consequence of such random fluctuations, thereby minimising variability, was able to explain a wide range of movement patterns. In summary, our brain evolved to control movement. The major intellectual challenge is to understand how we do that. Not only will such an understanding be applicable to robotic technology, but it is also highly relevant for the many diseases which affect movement. By understanding the normal processes that underlie control, we aim for a better understanding of disease processes, leading to better evaluation, treatments and rehabilitation techniques.
You can view Professor Wolpert’s TED talk at tinyurl.com/4xxquv4. For more information go to www.wolpertlab.com CAM 66 37
Review
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University Matters Gordon Chesterman Director of the University Careers Service
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Summer reading CAM asks a star panel of alumni and academics for their summer reading recommendations
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Music Gerald Finley, baritone
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Sport Women’s Cricket
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Prize crossword Capital Letters by Schadenfreude
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University Matters From tigers to technology Gordon Chesterman Director of the University Careers Service Patrick Morgan
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he Careers Service was founded in 1900. Back then we listed postings – for men only, of course – throughout the world: in India, for a good shot to rid an area of tigers; in Rhodesia, managing a tobacco plantation; in Montevideo as a shipping agent finding cargos for tramp steamers. Today, the world is a smaller place and Britain has lost her empire but ‘becoming global’ is still a key aim for many organisations. As a result, in addition to serving over 3,000 UK-based employers, the Careers Service is becoming more global too, and has a major role promoting graduate-level opportunities around the world to our UK and international students and postdoctoral researchers. Recent changes in government policy to reduce the UK’s immigration have made it harder for our international students to remain in the UK. The Careers Service now has an even greater duty to help them secure work across the world (while still serving our home market – Cambridge-based hi-tech companies, London-based professional firms, companies in manufacturing and engineering, the media and publishing and not-for-profit organisations). There are currently 7,200 international students from 130 countries studying at Cambridge, including 870 from China, 800 from America and one each from Namibia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. They will all enjoy the benefits of having acquired a degree at the world’s best university and, in addition, will return home with an understanding (and an affection, we hope) of our culture, a fluency in English and many lifelong friends. However, some will be at a slight disadvantage in the immediate employment market, having been away from home for three years, missing opportunities to meet potential employers, network and get beneath the skin of the local employment market. However, to cover all employment sectors for all 130 nationalities, would be a big ask for the Careers Service team to handle alone. We therefore rely heavily on collaboration and cooperation with many others. Every September, working with the Careers Services at Oxford, Imperial and the London School of Economics, we host a series of careers events in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong for our four universities’ students to meet local
There are currently 7,200 international students from 130 countries studying at Cambridge, including 870 from China, 800 from America and one each from Namibia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
employers. By collaborating we can offer employers the chance to meet four times the number of students had we worked alone. And with larger student attendances, we attract more employers and with more employers we attract more students and so on. During our busy Michaelmas term we welcome an experienced Careers Adviser from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to spend a week with us. During their stay they face a packed schedule, meeting our American students who are looking to return home for a career in academia or business.
In addition, there are few countries not represented by an active and enthusiastic student-run society at Cambridge. Several of these run informal career networking events and the Careers Service team willingly offer time and effort to support these events to complement the work of the Service. But despite these critical efforts, our main source of information and help for our international students has come from you – the huge network of Cambridge alumni in the UK and, increasingly, throughout the world. Many readers of CAM will have willingly volunteered to join our GradLink contact system. This password protected web-based service gives a brief career summary of over 1,200 former Cambridge students and their email addresses. All are willing to be contacted a few times a year by current students asking one or two questions about career trajectory, their current or previous employers, the skills and nature of their current role and so on. It is not intended as a way to recruit current students, although we regularly hear of jobs being secured as a result of an initial GradLink conversation. Similarly, if you are running an organisation with graduate-level vacancies to fill, or internship positions to offer, especially those based abroad, please let the Careers Service know. We will advertise these vacancies for you, free of charge, on our website, accessible only to Cambridge students and recent alumni. Every year, over 15,000 current students and researchers use this website, including 87% of final year students. And through these listings recent graduates and researchers have taken up opportunities as computational chemists in New York, medical researchers in Cameroon, academic research positions in Hong Kong, and environmental and food production researchers in Shanghai, furthering their own success, and that of their employer.
GradLink careers contact system Share your career story: If you would like to share your career story and offer advice by joining GradLink, visit www.careers.cam.ac.uk/gradlink Advertise your vacancies: To advertise vacancies free of charge, visit www.careers.cam.ac.uk/recruiting
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Books Summer reading
What will you be packing in your suitcase (or downloading onto your e-reader) this summer? CAM gathers recommendations from a panel of alumni and academics Words Olivia Gordon Illustrations Lara Harwood
Chris Blackhurst (Trinity Hall 1979) Editor of The Independent I normally take a huge pile of books on holiday – maybe I should take a Kindle instead. I’ve only skim-read Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman (Allen Lane), so I’ll be taking that on holiday. I seem to be doing nothing but having to talk about hacking and Leveson at the moment. We’re not even anywhere near criminal cases yet and we’re going to be living with this for years to come. As a primer for how the whole thing started, this book appears to be essential reading. Another book I plan to take is When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World, by Martin Jacques (Allen Lane). It came out in 2009 but it’s been updated for 2012. It’s an explanation of how China has become such an economic source. What’s alarming about this book and makes it more compelling is that we’ve always thought that the Chinese might adapt to become like us – but we might have to adapt to become like them. I’ll be sitting by the pool contemplating that. I always like William Boyd and don’t think
I’ve ever read a bad one. Waiting for Sunrise (Bloomsbury) has been extremely well reviewed. He’s a very good storyteller and there’s always plenty of challenging intelligence – and he holds together narrative extremely well. Another book I have on my pile is Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). I’ve been to Jerusalem and found the whole experience completely riveting with the collision of religions in one place claiming it for their own. There’s no city in the world like it. Professor Margaret Robinson Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in Clinical Biochemistry The thing I really love for bedtime reading is popular science. Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams (Viking) is my bedtime book at the moment. My first love as a child was my chemistry set, and although now I’m really a biologist, I’ve always been interested in the elements. This book describes them in an anecdotal, entertaining way. Another popular science book I’m planning to read, which I’ve been lent by a student, is The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Fourth Estate). My student says it’s fascinating from a historical point of view. The book I’m really looking forward to – so much that I will probably finish it in a few hours – is The Beginner’s Goodbye, the latest by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus). I love her novels and I want to wait until I have some really nice holiday time to read it; I don’t want to gobble it up. It’s deceptively simple writing and there’s not much plot, people say – but I feel I know her characters better than people I really do know, sometimes. Her subject, family, is so universal and speaks to anybody. Amanda Craig (Clare 1978) Novelist My favourite book so far this year is Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Harvard University Press). Not only is it written with a meticulous, scholarly attention to detail – just by focusing on all his mentions of blacking, he teases out insights into Charles Dickens’s feelings about his childhood, for instance – but every page is illuminated by insights into the way a novelist thinks and develops. It’s so good, so beautifully written and so wise that it feels like
a novel itself. Dickens has been a major influence on my own writing, especially about London, and Becoming Dickens was rather overshadowed by the publication of Clare Tomalin’s biography; but it is better, in my view. For children of nine-plus, I recommend Tim Willocks’ Doglands (Andersen), a sort of Gladiator for dogs, full of tragedy, violence, excitement and love. Unlike Gladiator, it ends happily, but it also makes any reader think about what dogs do for us, and how badly most humans treat them. Amanda Craig’s most recent book is Hearts and Minds (Abacus)
Dr Rowan Williams (Christ’s 1968) Archbishop of Canterbury and Master-Elect of Magdalene College Richard Sennett’s Together: the Rituals, Pleasure and Politics of Co-operation (Allen Lane) is a typically lucid and wonderfully wide-ranging essay on those things that are only enjoyed by being enjoyed together – a major contribution to current questionings about society and economics. And Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (Verso) is in a different league of sophistication from most recent attempts to define what acceptable residue might be distilled from traditional religion in a contemporary political ethic. Both offer crisp and bold proposals about how we urgently need to rethink what we are taking for granted about human flourishing. Sarah Franklin Professor of Sociology Call The Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s, by Jennifer Worth (Phoenix) – the book on which the BBC series is based – is amazing. I have been buying it on Amazon to give to people. Worth says in the book that it always struck her as odd that so little major literature or art or theatre represents the experience of being born, which is true, with the possible exception of Tristram Shandy. I liked her attempt to depict why giving birth is so fundamental. It’s a shame that the topics I research – new reproduction technologies – tend to generate quite a bit of bad writing. At the moment, I am reading a very interesting book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by anthropologist David Graeber (Melville House). It’s an absolutely fascinating account of why credit is so fundamental to the way economies work – it’s obviously very timely. Also fascinating is A Good Man, CAM 66 41
Richard Sennett’s Together is a typically lucid and wonderfully wide-ranging essay on those things that are only enjoyed by being enjoyed together
by Leon Speroff (Arnica Publishing). It’s a biography of Gregory Pincus, the scientist who developed contraception. He was an early innovator of public engagement – and it was appropriate that he did so – but he was ahead of his time in terms of the social aspects of science and I think he paid a high price for that. Also, there’s Ann Oakley’s book, A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury Academic). This is an amazing story about a Girton graduate who was also an economist, one of the founders of criminology, one of the first female members of the House of Lords, and a very inspiring person generally – a pacifist, and an early advocate of empirically based social policy (she was the first to demonstrate that capital punishment has no deterrent effect). Margaret Mountford (Girton 1970) Businesswoman and former adviser to Sir Alan Sugar for the BBC series The Apprentice What do I intend to read over the summer? DJ Enright’s revised version of the Moncrieff/ Kilmartin translation of Volume 1 of Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (Vintage). I confessed to someone that I had never got beyond the first couple of pages of Proust and I was told that this translation would ensure that I did, so I’m going to have another go. Also, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, by Mark Mazower (Harper Perennial), which has been lent to me by a Greek friend and which deals with a part of Greece about which I know very little. And having met a former Girtonian called Valerie Collins in Barcelona at the weekend, I intend to read In the Garlic (Santana Books) – what looks like a very amusing guide to Spain and its customs, written by Val and Theresa O’Shea. Joanne Harris (St Catharine’s 1982) Novelist At the moment, I’m reading The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday). It’s a terrific book, comic and sad and very honest, about a man’s journey on foot to the bedside of his dying friend. Harold is a wonderfully-drawn character – Rachel Joyce’s playwriting skills are very much in evidence here – and his story is at the same time emotionally gruelling and yet ultimately uplifting. I think it’s going to win prizes.
Tim Crane Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy and a Professorial Fellow of Peterhouse I tend to avoid philosophy books when I’m on holiday. They’re too tiring. History books are far more relaxing – they tell you things that have really happened instead of how people think the world should be. The sort of thing I really enjoy is A Concise Companion to History, edited by Ulinka Rublack (OUP). I don’t have time to read it at the moment but my plan is to take it on holiday. It looks rather beautiful, with essays by a whole bunch of Cambridge people on things like power, commerce, gender and communications throughout the whole of history. It’s interesting for me to see how world-leading historians like Christopher Bayly, Peter Burke and Pat Thane see their subject.
Like a lot of people I’m interested in the Second World War, and I can devour as many books on the subject as publishers provide. One I really want to read is called Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe (Viking), about how things started to fall apart in Europe after the war. My summer research reading is going to be a book by John Hawthorne and David Manley which has just come out called The Reference Book (OUP) – it’s about the relationship between language and reality. It’s not really for beginners but it’s a major statement in my field. Sarah Worthington Downing Professor of the Laws of England I like books about how the brain works. The book that I started a while ago and am finding fascinating is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (Allen Lane). It’s thoughtprovoking because it makes you realise that you make assumptions that the world works a particular way – he gives dramatic illustrations of how often you make a mistake or how often you’re right without being aware of the thought process. It’s one of those readslowly-and-digest books. If I came back in another life, I’d like to be either a novelist or an architect. And if I could be a novelist, I’d want to write like Josephine Hart. I love novels with high emotional content, but I like them to be tightly written. So when Hart wrote Damage (reissued recently as a Virago Modern Classic) I was blown away. I still remember how, in the early 1990s, I started it on the train from Cambridge to London, and when I got off at King’s Cross I sat in the station until I’d finished it. Chapter one is the most powerful way to start a novel I’ve read for a long, long time. I don’t know whether the books I’ve bought for holiday – My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young (HarperCollins), and Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman (Grove Press) – will come anywhere near that, but I’ve got high hopes.
CAMCard holders receive a 10% discount on all book purchases at Heffers in Trinity Street, Cambridge and online at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/camcard CAM 66 43
Music Gerald Finley
Gerald Finley: a CD shortlist Schumann Dichterliebe and other Heine songs (with Julius Drake) Hyperion CDA67676 Britten Songs and Proverbs of William Blake (with Julius Drake) Hyperion CDA67778 Mozart Così fan tutte (cond Rattle) EMI 556170-2 Mozart Le nozze di Figaro (DVD) (cond Haitink) NVC 0630 14013-2
Baritone Gerald Finley reflects on his apprenticeship at King’s and the challenges of Wagner’s longest role.
CAMCard holders receive a 10% discount on all CD purchases at Heffers Sound in Trinity Street, Cambridge.
Words Richard Wigmore
I
t felt like I’d entered a cultural time warp,” recalls Gerald Finley (King’s 1980) of his first experience of Cambridge. “After my fresh, modern upbringing in Montreal, it was as if I’d gone to sleep and woken up in this incredible atmosphere of centuries-old tradition and architectural beauty. I was fascinated, shocked and amused by all the social nuances and stratifications; and of course I had to tolerate mockery of my accent until I made vigorous efforts to absorb myself into the British landscape!” Although he agreed to limit his singing to choir duties in his final year (“It took me a long time to realise degrees were rather important at a university”), the Canadian outsider had already impressed with his outstanding vocal potential, not least when singing the bass solos in the St Matthew Passion in King’s Chapel alongside Janet Baker and Ian Partridge. “Bach’s music was crucial to me in those days – a huge part of what I was and what I became. The bass aria from the Magnificat was an audition piece for King’s choral scholars; and as an undergraduate I sang the solos in the St John Passion and the B-minor Mass for the Bach Society. But over time, as I did more and more opera, I found myself reluctantly leaving Bach behind.” Thirty years later, at his vocal peak, Finley is one of the world’s most versatile baritones, admired for the beauty of his voice – darkly mellow in timbre, yet with a hint of steel amid the velvet – his musical intelligence and his magnetic stage presence. As his operatic career evolved, so Bach has yielded to Mozart: Figaro – his debut role – then Papageno, Guglielmo in Così, Don Giovanni and, most recently, that other predatory aristocrat, Count Almaviva. “Those five roles have underpinned my enjoyment of singing,” he says. “I later took on Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, and had a brief association with Marcello in La bohème. But you catch me now post-Sachs [Wagner’s Nuremberg cobbler-philosopher in Die Meistersinger], by far the most demanding operatic part I’ve ever undertaken!” Confounding those who predicted that his warm lyric baritone would lack the requisite Wagnerian heft, Finley regularly drew standing ovations for his intensely moving portrayal of Sachs – Wagner’s most sympathetic male character – in David McVicar’s
Alastair Muir
“
Top: Gerald Finley in the role of Hans Sachs in last year's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg. Bottom: Gerald Finley and Johannes Martin Kranzle in the role of Sixtus Beckmesser.
2011 Glyndebourne production of Die Meistersinger. “I admit that Hans Sachs hadn’t seemed an inevitable career path. And apart from singing Wolfram [the minstrel-knight in Tannhäuser], I was a Wagner virgin, unlike so many big-voiced singers who come to Sachs with a lot of Wagnerian water already under the bridge.
“It’s an enormous role, of course, totalling some 6,000 words. For most of my career I’ve tried to balance concert singing, lieder recitals and opera. Sachs satisfied all three strands, and absolutely demanded that I sang the best I possibly could, using all the tools in my tool kit. It stretched me as never before.” When we speak in May, Finley is juggling lieder – another Schumann recording, following his Dichterliebe, plus a Winterreise at the Schubertiade in the Austrian Alps – with a return to the Vienna Staatsoper as Count Almaviva. Further Wagner roles beckon in 2013. Meanwhile, in the autumn, he slides back down the social scale with a return to Figaro, at the New York Met. Has Finley’s Sachs – a role it’s impossible to emerge from unchanged – affected his thinking on Mozart’s irrepressible barbercum-valet? “Well, both characters want things to be in good order for the balance of the community. Figaro is a philosopher in his way who initially thinks he has all the answers, but then needs Susanna to straighten him out. After Sachs I’ll be bringing a more mature conception to Figaro. He’ll be more chastened, more complex – and he’ll certainly appreciate Susanna a lot more in the end!” CAM 66 45
Charlie Troman
Sport Helen Webster, Cricket Words Becky Allen
I
t’s the return to grass, rather than the arrival of swifts or swallows, that signals the approach of summer for Emmanuel’s second-year engineer Helen Webster. At the beginning of the Easter term, the current crop of 20 members of the Women’s Cricket Club get together at Fenner’s for Cricket Week. “It’s a week of intense training to sharpen up our fielding and make sure we’re ready for the season,” Webster explains. “We get some practice on the grass, which is a bit different from indoor nets during the winter. And we really enjoy getting back outside.” Wicket-keeper and batsman Webster took on the role of club captain this year after a very
successful 2011 season, which culminated in a win against Oxford in the 50-over Varsity Match at Lord’s Cricket Ground. “Last year we bowled Oxford out for just over 50 and then knocked off the runs pretty quickly. Two of our bowlers took nine wickets between them – they were on top form,” she says. Indeed, playing at Lord’s – as well as beating Oxford – was one of the highlights of her first year. “Varsity was on one of the hottest days of last year,” she remembers. “When we arrived at Lord’s, England captain Andrew Strauss was having a net on the nursery ground with Graham Gooch – you get a feel for the prestige of the place. It’s the home
of cricket. It’s a privilege to play there and we’re very fortunate they invite us in.” Despite the sport’s elegant image, it is the tension and team work that Webster appreciates. “It’s such a great game, and it’s never decided until the final ball’s bowled,” she says. “It’s a game that can swing very quickly from one side to another and everyone needs to be at their best to pull off a win. You can’t just rely on one or two people, because if an opening batsman gets out, the rest of the team has to step up and score runs as well.” But it is her brother she has to thank for first getting her interested in the game. “I went to a girls’ school where cricket wasn’t really on offer, but when my brother started going to our local cricket club, I wanted to go too. He seemed to be enjoying it a lot and it looked fun.” Even though Webster has 10 years of cricket under her belt, the women’s club at Cambridge welcomes those who have never picked up a bat, as well as more experienced players. “We always want to encourage new people to play,” she says. “It’s an easy way to get into the sport compared with joining a local club, which can be quite intimidating because everyone’s good. And because the Cambridge women’s squad is small, even newcomers to the game stand a good chance of making the team. “The standard of men’s cricket at Cambridge is extremely high. While we might have a couple of players who aren’t very experienced, if they train hard, they can still make the Varsity squad – whereas in the men’s squad there are very experienced players who are still only in the second team,” she says. Differences in power and strength, too, set the women’s game apart from its male counterpart. “You often see quite a high standard of technical ability in the women’s game because we’re lacking the brute force,” Webster explains. “Because we don’t score as many fours and sixes, there’s a lot more running between the wickets, so you need a reasonable level of fitness. You’ve also got to bowl consistently good lines and lengths because unlike the men, we can’t rely solely on pace to get batsmen out.” And coming as it does in the Easter term, the cricket season also provides welcome relief from revision. “It’s a really good way of escaping from the stress and hype of revising for exams,” she says. “I love getting out there – it’s a good break and relaxing, and the results of the cricketers last year show it doesn’t do any damage to your grades. You just need to hit the right balance.”
www.cucc.net/pages/women
CAM 66 47
CAM 66 Prize Crossword
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Capital Letters by Schadenfreude 1
2
3 10
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22 25
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All entries to be received by 7 September, 2012 Send completed crosswords: • by post to CAM 66 Prize Crossword, CARO, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge CB5 8AB • by email to cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk • or enter online at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam
The first correct entrant will receive a copy of The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC: Athens to London 1984 to 2012 (Mainstream, £40), the only parallel, chronological history of both the IOC and the Games, by David Miller (Peterhouse 1953). Two runners-up will also receive £35 to spend on CUP publications. Solution and winners will be printed in CAM 67 and posted online on 14 September at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam One word must be removed from the last few clues before solving. The first and last letters of these words spell out two thematic locations. The wordplay in each of the remaining clues generates the answer to be entered in the grid plus an additional letter. These letters spell out the names of some Cambridge alumni who share a common thematic achievement. Solvers are required to highlight all the cells suggested by the title in conjunction with one of the above
48 CAM 66
locations. Before doing this they will need to change three unchecked cells, providing new words, one of which is a variant spelling of the original. The three replaced letters and the new letters form the title of a relevant magazine and a university fellow, respectively. Chambers 2011 is recommended, but does not give 1 across which is in the OED and SOED, nor a referenced forename—in earlier editions.
ACROSS 1 These gypsy caravans provide Viagra and pass on a regular basis (6) 5 Embarrassed sailor left old tavern (6) 10 Lecturer on good terms with nobleman of legitimate descent (6) 12 Look in rock base for membranous growths (4) 13 “Very ordinary” covers Woman’s society page (5) 14 Force head to conceal gold (6) 15 Intimate minutes get progressively shorter (7, 2 words) 17 Display Welsh girl topless, like April? (7) 19 Profligate unionist in a dressing gown (4) 20 Harry Llewellyn for example finally chose to venture out (7) 22 Autocrat is anxious about Rex (6) 24 Six pursuing gas trial at Inverness (6) 25 Troy managed this crippling reverse (7) 30 Withhold assent to alien entering two wings (4) 31 Nasal passages reflect an anonymous echo (7) 33 This may be raised in surprise with eye turning on you twice (7) 34 Outside pen pig demolished one of Szewinska’s dishes (6) 35 Turned component definitely not always readily available (5, 2 words) 36 Consequently leave following important date (4) 37 First class school’s opening with fewer corridors (6) 38 These’ll help teacher improve in religious instruction and acting (6) 39 Poet’s to sanction being without females (6)
DOWN 1 In detail mercilessly criticize five veristic works (8) 2 Soul to long for Don, the US movie star (6) 3 Repudiate god with vulgar name (6) 4 Second prize given by the Queen is comparatively simple in appearance (7) 6 Tightrope walker not at home: she’s changing the spotlights (7) 7 Hawaiian party following a run at Calgary? (4) 8 A gown son Jack removed from Hattie perhaps (6) 9 Jock’s to lift explosive close to fuse over Texan’s metal bar (5) 11 Number seven to finish with a hooter (5) 16 Timothy goes inside to show posterior piece of mechanism (6) 18 A salt mostly irritated by expression of triumph (6) 21 Rising star carrying firearm warrants (8) 23 Idiot on throne holding electronic weapon (7) 24 An article I understand, to speak as a non-believer (7) 26 Weary soldiers at the front all retreat (6) 27 Book written in restrained, economical and too relaxed language (5) 28 Dutch composer died very heartbroken (6) 29 Medicine men indecently handle women stopping when excited (6) 30 Ovid’s no heart meeting a treacherous person (5) 32 Nothing in pass is free from sudden excitement (4)
Solution to CAM 65 Crossword Mind your Ps & Qs by Ifor Winner: David Agg (King’s 1981) Runners-up: Ted Defley (Pembroke 1968) and joint entrants Dr Martin Bright (Selwyn 1995) and Nicola Bright (Clare 2001). Of the many entries we received, only 25 were entirely correct.
Highlighted yellow cells left vacant in the initial grid permit the movement of P, P, P, Q as shown by the final poition of white pieces in red and black in black, in one version of the so-called fool's mate in chess (1. f4 e6. 2.g4 3.Qh4 mate). The six replacement answers shaded red are the mates/partners of the clued fools/comedians. GENAE is in OED.
FOOL’S MATE