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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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Betrayed by Nature: The War on Cancer

Dr Robin Hesketh (Senior Lecturer, Department of Biochemistry)

Despite the medical advances of the last century, cancer kills over half-a-million people every year in the United States. Yet despite the tenacity of this universal scourge, the science behind the disease remains a mystery to many people.

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Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Director of the Autism Research Centre)

In Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness Simon Baron-Cohen takes fascinating and challenging new look at what exactly makes our behaviour uniquely human. How can we ever explain human cruelty? We have always struggled to understand why some people behave in the most evil way imaginable, while others are completely self-sacrificing. Is it possible that - rather than thinking in terms of 'good' and 'evil' - all of us instead lie somewhere on the empathy spectrum, and our position on that spectrum can be affected by both genes and our environments?

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The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Dr Robert Macfarlane (Pembroke 1994)

In The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove - roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes criss-crossing the British landscape and its waters, and connecting them to the continents beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and ritual, and of songlines and their singers.

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The Diamond Queen: Elizabeth II and Her People

Andrew Marr (Trinity 1977)

With the flair for narrative and the meticulous research that readers have come to expect, Andrew Marr turns his attention to the monarch and to the monarchy, chronicling the Queen's pivotal role at the centre of the state, which is largely hidden from the public gaze, and making a strong case for the institution itself.

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Royal River: Power, Pageantry & the Thames

Dr David Starkey (Fitzwilliam 1964), Simon Thurley and Sarah Monks

This lavishly illustrated catalogue, published to accompany the major exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in 2012, explores the history of the Thames as a stage for Royal power, celebration and symbolism. It provides a thematic overview of major events and key individuals from the Tudor age onwards. Dr David Starkey, the leading authority on Britain's royal history, is the exhibition's guest curator. In the book, Dr Starkey and other experts examine the history of the Thames, London's greatest 'street' .

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A Brief Life of the Queen

Robert Lacey (Selwyn 1963)

The Queen is a succinct and intimate biography of Elizabeth II, who has managed to remain enigmatic yet is the most recognized woman in the world. For more than 30 years Robert Lacey has been gathering material from the members of the Queen's inner circle - her friends, relatives, private secretaries and prime ministers - and the results are distilled in this elegant, small format hardback, at under £10 contrasting deliberately with the other weighty and expensive Jubilee tomes.

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Luck: What it Means and Why it Matters

Ed Smith (Peterhouse 1995)

Tracing the history of the concepts of luck and fortune, destiny and fate, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day - in religion, in banking, in politics - Ed Smith argues that the question of luck versus skill is as pertinent today as it has ever been. Weaving in his personal stories - notably the fortunate encounter, on a train he seemed fated to miss, with a beautiful stranger who would become his wife - he challenges us to think again about chance, and to re-examine the question of innate ability and of privileges, both accidental and unavoidable, that are conferred at birth.

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Love, Mortality and the Moving Image

Professor Emma Wilson (Newnham 1985)

In their use of home movies, collages of photographs and live footage, moving image artists explore the wish to see dead loved ones living. This study scrutinizes emotions and sensations surrounding mortality and longing. Its focus is on love, tenderness, and eroticism, on the undoing of the self in desire and loss, and on the pursuit of relations with a missing other.

The Plan: How Fletcher and Flower Transformed English Cricket

Steve James (Hughes Hall 1988)

In 1999, England slumped to a new low in their long and tumultuous cricket history. Defeat in a home series at the hands of a mediocre New Zealand team saw them fall to the bottom of the world Test rankings, below even Zimbabwe. Yet only just over a decade later, England had reached the top. It has been a remarkable and profound transformation, brought about largely by two men with an insatiable desire to succeed, Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower.

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The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre versus Camus

Dr Andy Martin (King's 1980)

Jean-Paul Sartre is the author of possibly the most notorious one-liner of twentieth-century philosophy: 'Hell is other people'. Albert Camus was The Outsider. The two men first came together in Occupied Paris in the middle of the Second World War, and quickly became friends, comrades, and mutual admirers. But the intellectual honeymoon was short-lived.

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The Farewell Glacier

Nick Drake (Magdalene 1980)

The poems in The Farewell Glacier grew out of a journey to the High Arctic. In late 2010 Nick Drake sailed around Svalbad, an archipelago of islands 500 miles north of Norway, with people from Cape Farewell, the arts climate change organisation. It was the end of the Arctic summer. The sun took eight hours to set. When the sky briefly darkened, the Great Bear turned about their heads as it had for Pythias the Greek, the first European known to have explored this far north.

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Betting on China

Rob Koepp (Magdalene 1998)

The phrase “Made in China" is ubiquitous, and China's status as a consumer of everything from natural resources to advanced technology is well established, but how did it get there? Looking at the financial drivers of the country's phenomenal growth, in particular, the high-risk venture capital and private equity finance currently feeding the entrepreneurship and innovation that is positioning China at the forefront of tomorrow's industries, Betting on China sheds much needed light on the poorly understood, often disregarded subject of how the country became a global power.

Cover painting: Frank Auerbach, Head of Gerda Boehm, 1978–9 (detail). Oil on board, 56.5 x 71.1 cm (22 1/4 x 28 in). Private collection. Copyright © Frank Auerbach, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art. Photograph courtesy of Yvonne Burt.

We Look Like This

Dan Burt (St John's 1964)

We Look Like This anatomizes how history, violence, power, lust and mortality work on us. Burt's formal, muscular language evokes a world of war, want, cruelty and hope, as well as childhood among ‘tough Jews’ in Philadelphia, dominated by his father Joe, son of Ukrainian immigrants, butcher, boxer and, late in life, coastal fisherman. Joe's last world, Barnegat inlet and the sea off the New Jersey coast, are counterpoint to and salvation from hard streets for father and son.

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The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC: Athens to London 1894-2012

David Miller (Peterhouse 1953)

The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC is a dramatic account of the history of the world’s foremost sporting spectacle. It is the lavishly illustrated story of the re-creation of the Olympic Games by Pierre de Coubertin, of the often controversial fortunes of the governing body, which was formed in 1894, and of the highs and lows of the Olympics themselves since the first Games in 1896.

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Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer

Edited by Neil Pattison (Queens’ 2001), Reitha Pattison (Darwin 2007) & Luke Roberts (Fitzwilliam 2005)

This book brings together a selection of prose works from the legendary poetry circular The English Intelligencer (1966–68), one of the definitive documents of later twentieth-century British poetry. Its shifting cast of contributors included such major figures in modernist poetry as Andrew Crozier, John James, Barry MacSweeney, J.H. Prynne, and Peter Riley. The correspondence and essays published here for the first time represent the discourse of an extraordinary group of young poets struggling collectively and independently to articulate the terms of a radical poetics.

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What Are Universities For?

Professor Stefan Collini (Jesus 1966)

Across the world, universities are more numerous than they have ever been, yet at the same time there is unprecedented confusion about their purpose and skepticism about their value. What Are Universities For? offers a spirited and compelling argument for completely rethinking the way we see our universities, and why we need them.

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Alan M Turing Centenary Edition

Sara Turing

'In a short life he accomplished much, and to the roll of great names in the history of his particular studies added his own.' So is described one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century, yet Alan Turing's name was not widely recognised until his contribution to the breaking of the German Enigma code became public in the 1970s. The story of Turing's life fascinates and in the years since his suicide, Turing's reputation has only grown, as his contributions to logic, mathematics, computing, artificial intelligence and computational biology have become better appreciated.

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Rule and Ruin

Geoffrey Kabaservice (Jesus 1988)

As the 2012 elections approach, the Republican Party is rocketing rightward away from the center of public opinion. Republicans in Congress threaten to shut down the government and force a U.S. debt default. Tea Party activists mount primary challenges against Republican officeholders who appear to exhibit too much pragmatism or independence. Moderation and compromise are dirty words in the Republican presidential debates. The GOP, it seems, has suddenly become a party of ideological purity. Except this development is not new at all.

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