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Explore a selection of publications by alumni and academics, and books with a link to the University or Cambridge

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PopUpular Cambridge - the city in creases

John O'Hare (Homerton 1994)

Recreate the timeless beauty of Cambridge with paper engineering. Build 55 display-worthy pop-up architectural origami sculptures of Cambridge University, the colleges and city scenes. With full colour instructions and templates, no previous crafting experience is needed. The models are brought to life with a wealth of tourist information, infographics and architectural background mixing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) with Arts.

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Journal of Two Plague Years

George W. Liebmann (Visiting Fellow 1996)

This is a collection of 70 op-ed pieces appearing in the Baltimore Sun, The American Conservative Online, the Washington Examiner, Chronicles Online, the Washington Times, and the Calvert Institute website in the two years beginning with the presidential election of 2020. It reflects the views of a writer discouraged by the indifference to constitutional values of former President Trump and the devotion to identity politics and moral nihilism of too many of his opponents.

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True Lies and Short Takes: Assorted Life Writing Essays

Eugene Stelzig (King's 1966)

This gathering of autobiographical essays focuses on different experiences and periods of the author’s life and hybrid identity: a childhood spent in Austria, teenage years in an American school and then a lycèe in France, coming to the U.S. as a young adult and attending college, studying in England for two years, and then settling permanently in the U.S. into an academic career. The word “essay” in the title is meant in its original or French sense, as an attempt or trial.

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Taming The Beast - Memoirs of a Pioneering Cancer Physician

John Fletcher Smyth (Trinity 1964)

This short autobiography recounts my life as a professional singer and cancer researcher. I was the inaugural Professor of Medical Oncology in Edinburgh (1979-) and have played a major part in developing cancer medicine in the UK and Europe. I reflect on the amazing changes in cancer treatment over the past 50 years from cancer being an "untamed" disease to the present day when we have managed to control (tame) so many of these disease that now affect 1 in 2 of us. I have also enjoyed making music with Sir John Eliot Gardiner amongst others for over 50 years.

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Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata – or, Why Does the Krishna Avatāra Inaugurate the Worst Yuga?

Simon Brodbeck (Clare 1989)

Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata reflects on the theology of time in this early Hindu text and poses the key question: why does the Krishna avatāra inaugurate the worst yuga? The Sanskrit Mahābhārata describes a massive war facilitated by God and the gods. That war took place between the third and the last ages of a 12,000-year cycle; within the cycle, moral behaviour and human lifespan always decrease in steps before being rebooted for the next cycle (initial lifespan 400 years).

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Reimagining Arab Political Identity: Justice, Women's Rights, and the Arab State

Salam Hawa (Lucy Cavendish 1988)

This book discusses the idea that Arab cultural and political identity has been suppressed by centuries of dominance by imperial outsiders and by religious and nationalist ideologies with the result that present day Arab societies are characterised by a crisis of identity where fundamentalism or chaos seem to be the only available choices.

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Grounded

Alisa Bryce (Jesus 2012)

Life on land could not exist without soil. Almost everything we need can be traced to the soil: food, fibre, medicines and more. What would we be without it? Certainly not a planet worthy of the name Earth.There are already plenty of books about agriculture, ecology or how to grow tomatoes. This book is about the other stuff. Like…

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The Woman Before

Jennifer Moore (Selwyn 1994)

A perfect home… A destructive obsession… A fatal secret… When Fern and Paul move into the large, old house on Crenellation Lane, with beautiful high ceilings and a luscious garden, they think they’ve found their dream home. After the devastating loss of Fern’s twin sister, it will be a fresh start and somewhere to raise their first baby. But as soon as they arrive, Fern starts having terrifying nightmares about the woman who lived there before. When the woman showed Fern around, they bonded over their pregnancies. Now, Fern can’t let her go.

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Reflections Before and During Covid-19

Henry Disney (Sidney Sussex 1959)

The Covid pandemic has impacted all our lives. The new poems in this volume constitute a challenging set of reflections and provide an interesting contrast with some of the poems the author published before Covid-19. The author is a distinguished entomologist who is author or co-author of hundreds of scentific papers and 10 previous books of poems.

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Pocket GCSE Latin Etymological Lexicon

Caroline K. Mackenzie (Pembroke 1991)

Looking at your Latin GCSE vocab list and wondering where to start? Teaching yourself Latin and wanting a refresher on some of the most common Latin words? Interested in how Latin can help us better understand the meaning of modern English? Then this is the book for you!

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Placing the Origins of the Buddha: An Island, Its People, and an Orientalist Odyssey

Bhadrajee S. Hewage (St Edmund's 2020)

Our understanding that the Buddha emerged from the Middle Gangetic region of the Indian subcontinent has been largely unchallenged for the past 200 years. However, can we truly trust our existing knowledge regarding the geographical locations associated with early Buddhism? Could the Buddha’s origins, in fact, lie elsewhere?

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At the Court of Broken Dreams

Laurence Baillie Brown (King's 1972)

This real historical Game of Thrones is set in the late fifteenth century in the Wars of the Roses. A disgruntled younger son of a fallen Duke, Eddy De-la-Pole, bisexual and deeply ambitious, dominated by his beloved mother Alice Chaucer (the poet's granddaughter), nurtures a bromance with Anthony Wydville, brother of the Yorkist Queen. But the manipulative Queen separates them. How will Eddy choose between his beloved friend and the rising star of the dynastic firmament, Richard Duke of Gloucester?

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The Ballad of Billy Bean

Ian Lewis (Fitzwilliam 1972)

London, 1913. 14–year–old Billy Bean is a thief. He’s also a talented street performer, and he’s picked up by Fred Karno’s music–hall company. Then Charlie Chaplin leaves Karno for the movies, and Billy is sent to America to replace him. Billy wants to work in movies, too, and it’s not long before he gets his lucky break. But his luck runs out and the movie career goes badly. Soon he’s on the streets again, hoping that his childhood skills and a cheeky grin will keep him from starvation.

A historical novel for all ages 10+.

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The Great English Golf Boom, 1864-1914: A History

Michael B Morrison (Darwin 1978)

Golf had been played in Scotland for centuries with virtually no interest expressed in it south of the border. By the mid-19th century it was acknowledged as the national sport of Scotland, while the English remained stubbornly unmoved by the game. Even when other sports such as football, cricket, rugby and tennis were taking off in England in the 1870s, golf was only played by a small minority in a scattering of places around the country.

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The Uncaged Sky

Kylie Moore-Gilbert (Wolfson 2009)

'The sky above our heads was uncaged and unlike us, free.' The Uncaged Sky is Kylie Moore-Gilbert's remarkable story of courage and resilience, and a powerful meditation on hope, solidarity and what it means to be free. On 12 September 2018 British-Australian academic Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was arrested at Tehran Airport by Iran's feared Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Convicted of espionage in a shadowy trial presided over by Iran's most notorious judge, she was given a 10 year sentence and ultimately spent 804 days incarcerated in Tehran's Evin and Qarchak prisons.

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Our Parent Who Art in Heaven

Garry Powell (Selwyn 1974)

Welshman Huw Lloyd-Jones teaches Creative Writing at a charming college in the American South, and is in love with his beautiful wife, Miranda. But his idyllic life is about to change. His despotic Chair, Frida Shamburger, turns against him, and Miranda reveals that he can no longer count on her love. Huw must fight to save his job and marriage. Yet can a middle-aged white man survive in the woke jungle of academia? And with a sinister psychiatrist and a women's guru encouraging Miranda to be independent, can the couple's love prevail?

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Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Unlocking its potential

Janak Gunatilleke (Clare 2013)

Do you want to learn about how AI can and can’t help improve healthcare? Do you want to learn how to improve the adoption of AI in healthcare? AI is often seen as a silver bullet, but in many instances AI and data based solutions in healthcare don’t fully address the problem and are sometimes not clinically safe. The current adoption of AI in healthcare is at best ad hoc, with a large number of solutions stuck in the proof of concept stage, limited to certain specialities or without robust evidence of their effectiveness.

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You've Been Played: How Companies, Governments and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

Adrian Hon (Trinity 2000)

How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation - and what we can do about it. Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.

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Worshipping a Crucified Man: Christians, Graeco-Romans and Scripture in the Second Century

Jeremy Hudson (Christ's 1973)

Christian converts of the second century CE - writing a century or so after the death of Jesus - engaged in debates with non-Christians educated in classical Graeco-Roman culture, seeking to persuade them of the truth of Christianity. This book shows how they used the ancient Jewish Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) in their arguments, even though their audiences were unfamiliar with those texts.

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Diary of the Last Man

Phillip R Brown (St John's 1972)

Diary of the Last Man is a fictional diary written by an anonymous 'patient' whom is undergoing compulsory experimental trials designed to discover a vaccine to combat a virus, known as the Omega Strain, which is quickly decimating the entire human race. Kept in solitary confinement and under close surveillance, he is permitted to make diary entries in the hope that they may shed light on the cerebral effects of the experimental 'medication' to which he is subjected.

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