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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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The Lost Carving: a journey to the heart of making

Dr David Esterly (St Catharine's 1966)

Awestruck by the sight of a Grinling Gibbons carving in a London church, David Esterly chose to dedicate his life to the art - its physical control, intricate beauty and intellectual demands. Forty years later, he is the foremost practitioner of Gibbons's forgotten technique, which revolutionised ornamental sculpture in the late 1600s. After a fire at Hampton Court Palace in 1986 destroyed much of Gibbons's masterpiece, the job fell to David Esterly to restore his idol's work to its former glory.

• P • I • T • O • T • I •

Dr Christopher Chippindale (curator at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) and Dr Frederick Baker (Co-Director of the Cambridge University Prehistoric Picture Project,G uest Lecturer, Cambridge University Screen Media and Cult

• P • I • T • O • T • I • presents the fascinating results of the meeting of new digital arts with ancient rock-art images, known as pitoti in the dialect of Valcamonica. The prehistoric pictures, with which the Alpine valley abounds, become like film stills in a vast cinema auditorium. Their peck-marks, pexils, hammered in the rock have been transformed in the pixels of digital imagery.

Red Joan

Jennie Rooney (St John's 1998)

Joan's voice is almost a whisper. 'Nobody talked about what they did during the war. We all knew we weren't allowed to.' Joan Stanley has a secret. She is a loving mother, a doting grandmother, and leads a quiet, unremarkable life in the suburbs. Then one morning there is a knock on the door, and suddenly the past she has been so keen to hide for the last fifty years threatens to overturn her comfortable world. Cambridge University in 1937 is awash with ideas and idealists, yet unworldly Joan feels better suited to a science lecture and a cup of cocoa.

We Are Here

Michael Marshall (King's 1984)

Have you ever wondered what happens to friends from the past when you move on and don’t need them any longer…?

David is an author, on the verge of having his first novel published. His life is finally looking up after years of struggle. But a chance encounter with a man who whispers ‘Remember me?’ is just the start of a chain of sinister events. Catherine has everything she could wish for; a strong marriage, two children, a house in an affluent area of Manhattan, but she believes she’s being stalked....

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The Kombi Trail: Across Three Continents in a VW Van

Robert Cox (Corpus Christi 1959), Roger Sherwin (St Catharine’s 1958), Tony Thompson (St Catharine’s 1958)

Following plans hitched within the walls of St Catharine’s college, nine dare-devil Cambridge students set off in 1961 on the trip of a lifetime after their graduation. Their mode of transport was the iconic VW Kombi van and their journey took them across three continents at a time of global political, economic and cultural turbulence. With the world in the grip of the Cold War, the students moved through the Soviet Union, the Middle East, South Africa and Asia. They meet treacherous terrain and undergo some nerve-wracking, often bizarre encounters.

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Francis Schaeffer (Bitesize Biography)

Rev. J Mostyn Roberts (Pembroke 1975)

We may call him a prophet for his prescient analysis of trends in philosophy that explain where we are today; we may call him an apologist; less accurately, though popular articles and publishers’ blurbs delight in it, he may be called a philosopher. Fundamentally though, Francis Schaeffer rejoiced in being a pastor and evangelist. That is how he began, and through many twists and turns, that is what he remained to the end.

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The Ellington Century

David Schiff (Clare 1967)

Breaking down walls between genres that are usually discussed separately - classical, jazz, and popular - this highly engaging book offers a compelling new integrated view of twentieth-century music.

Placing Duke Ellington (1899-1974) at the center of the story, David Schiff explores music written during the composer's lifetime in terms of broad ideas such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. He shows how composers and performers across genres shared the common pursuit of representing the rapidly changing conditions of modern life.

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The Cambridge Phenomenon: 50 years of Innovation and Enterprise

Kate Kirk and Charles Cotton

The Cambridge Phenomenon: 50 Years of Innovation and Enterprise covers the remarkable history of the Phenomenon since 1960, from the challenges of starting businesses in a hostile environment to the boom years in the late 1980s and 1990s, the dotcom bust in 2000 and the new reality of starting and growing businesses when money is tight.

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Teach us of Love

Dr R Henry Disney (Sidney Sussex 1959, Senior Research Associate in the Dept of Zoology)

This collection of stirring verses gathers into a single volume previously unpublished poems primarily concerned with musings about the author’s Christian faith–a faith which is neither facile nor sentimental–a faith which is less concerned with abstract doctrine than with living out the Gospel in every day living and in how one relates to the variety of people one encounters. Topics include family life, human nature, politics, an earnest faith and a variety of poignant situations.

The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet

Dr Clare E Harris (Robinson 1984)

For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. By contrast, the Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa by the Chinese in 1999 was designed to reclassify Tibetan objects as cultural relics and the Dalai Lama as obsolete. Suggesting that both these views are suspect, Clare E. Harris argues in The Museum on the Roof of the World that for the past one hundred and fifty years, British and Chinese collectors and curators have tried to convert Tibet itself into a museum, an image some Tibetans have begun to contest.

Persuasion and Power: The Art of Strategic Communication

James P Farwell (Trinity 1971)

Now more than ever, in the arenas of national security, diplomacy, and military operations, effective communication strategy is of paramount importance. A 24/7 television, radio, and Internet news cycle paired with an explosion in social media demands it. According to James P. Farwell, a former political consultant, the US government's approach to strategic communication has been misguided.

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Elizabeth I: the people’s queen?

Liz Woodhouse (Girton 1959)

A different window on the first half of the famous Queen's life. Elizabeth I is a historical novel narrated by the three women who knew her best (real figures from history), Lady Margaret Bryan, Kat Ashley and Lady Catherine Knollys. Their unique, backstage angle on Elizabeth's story brings to vivid life the dramatic and dangerous period of the Tudors. Elizabeth's formative years left harsh scars, but at 25 she reached the throne, to great rejoicing.

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Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy

Dr William H Janeway Hon CBE (Pembroke 1965)

The innovation economy begins with discovery and culminates in speculation. Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error: upstream exercises in research and invention and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation.

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The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes (King's 1902), edited by Elizabeth Johnson, Donald Moggridge and Austin Robinson

Available in electronic and paperback format for the first time, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes is published on behalf of The Royal Economic Society and comprises thirty volumes of all Keynes’ published books and articles, including writing from his time in the India Office and Treasury, correspondence in which he developed ideas in argument with fellow economists, and correspondence relating to public affairs.

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Cambridge in Concrete: Images from the RIBA British Architectural Library Photographs Collection

Edited by Dr Marco Iuliano (Researcher in the Department of Architecture) and Professor Francois Penz (Darwin 1978, Professor of Architecture and the Moving Image in the Department of Architecture, Fellow of Darwin College)

Drawing upon visual material from the Library, this book contains illustrated essays examining the concrete structures in Cambridge built between the 1950s and 1960s and their legacy. As well as embodying the optimistic and innovative spirit of architecture in the post-war period, these buildings are part of the hidden and misunderstood heritage of the city. The book accompanies an exhibition held at the University of Cambridge in 2012.

Find out more in CAM 67's Concrete Cambridge.

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Marital Agreements and Private Autonomy in Comparative Perspective

Dr Jens M Scherpe (University Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College)

This book deals with a subject that has recently been the focus of debate and law reform in many jurisdictions: how much scope should spouses have to conclude agreements concerning their financial affairs - and under what circumstances should such agreements be binding and enforceable? These marital agreements include pre-nuptial, post-nuptial and separation agreements.

Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond

Edited by Dr Piers Mitchell (Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Biological Anthropology)

Excavations of medical school and workhouse cemeteries undertaken in Britain in the last decade have unearthed fascinating new evidence for the way that bodies were dissected or autopsied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Rough Guide to the Dark Side

Daniel Simpson (Clare 1993)

Ever dreamed of changing the world? Daniel Simpson shows how not to do it. His memoir charts a gonzo career at The New York Times. Ambitious and idealistic, he was hired to report on the Balkans but quit within months, freaked out by his editor's zeal for starting wars.

The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man

Dr Christos Lynteris (Mellon/Newton Postdoctoral Fellow 2011-13 at CRASSH

Assuming power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party was faced with a crucial problem: how to construct the socialist 'New Man'? On the one hand, led by Liu Shaoqi, the proponents of the technocracy advocated self-cultivation. Led by Mao Zedong, their opponents advocated the exact opposite technique: the abolition of the self and the institution of a mass subjectivity.

Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh/India Border

Delwar Hussain (King's 2007)

When anthropologist Delwar Hussain arrived in a remote coal mining village on the Bangladesh/India border to research the security fence India is building around its neighbour, he discovered more about the globalised world than he had expected.

The present narrative of the Bangladesh/India border is one of increasing violence. Not so long ago, it was the site of a monumental modernist master-plan, symbolic of a larger optimism which was to revolutionise post-colonial nations around the world.

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