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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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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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Middle Age: a Natural History

Dr David Bainbridge (Emmanuel 1986), Clinical Verinary Anatomist in the University's Department of Physiology

Dr David Bainbridge is a vet with a particular interest in evolutionary zoology - and he has just turned forty. As well as the usual concerns about greying hair, failing eyesight and goldfish levels of forgetfulness, he finds himself pondering some bigger questions: have I come to the end of my productive life as a human being? And what I am now for? By looking afresh at the latest research from the fields of anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, and reproductive biology, it seems that the answers are surprisingly, reassuringly encouraging.

The Coder Special Archive: The Untold Story of Naval National Servicemen Learning and Using Russian During the Cold War

Mike Gerrard and Tony Cash, featuring contributions from alumni including but not limited to: Sir John Drummond (Trinity 1955), Dr James Muckle (Peterhouse 1957) and Mark Frankland (Pembroke 1954)

The authors along with 70 plus former 1950s national service Naval conscripts reveal how they learned Russian, spied on the Soviet military and shed light on the East-West conflict, including alumni of both JSSL (Joint Services School for Linguists) in Cambridge and the University of Cambridge. Acclaimed dramatist and author Alan Bennett (who came to the JSSL in Cambridge and went on to Oxford) supplies the foreword.

College Chapels

Greg Dickens (Selwyn 2004)

Veterinary student and photographer Greg Dickens has here collected the images from his hugely successful exhibition into an accessible and beautiful hardback volume.

Perfidy and Passion: Reintroducing the Iliad

Mark Buchan (Christ's 1985)

Homer’s Iliad is often considered a poem of blunt truthfulness, his characters’ motivation pleasingly simple. A closer look, however, reveals a complex interplay of characters who engage in an awful lot of lies. Beginning with Achilles, who hatches a secret plot to destroy his own people, Mark Buchan traces motifs of deception and betrayal throughout the poem. Homer’s heroes offer bluster, their passion linked to and explained by their lack of authenticity. Buchan reads Homer’s characters between the lies, showing how the plot is structured individual denial and what cannot be said.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: a 21st Century Bestiary

Caspar Henderson (Corpus Christi 1981)

From Axolotl to Zebrafish, meet a world of barely imagined beings: real creatures that are often stranger and more astonishing than anything dreamt in the pages of a medieval bestiary. Ranging from the depths of the ocean to the most arid corners of the earth, Caspar Henderson captures the beauty and bizarreness of the many living forms we thought we knew and some we could never have contemplated, and invites us to better imagine the world around us.

Stoning the Devil

Garry Craig Powell (Selwyn 1974)

Stoning the Devil is a novel set in the United Arab Emirates, a country of paradoxes, of seediness and glamour, of desert grandeur and Disneyland vulgarity, where public executions and other barbaric customs are winked at by the western expats who run the economy.

Colin, a professor of literature, is not the 'typical' expat, ignorant and interested only in pleasure and his stock portfolio, but a speaker of Arabic and an admirer of Arab culture - or is he? To his Arab wife, he is an Orientalist who exoticizes and patronises the locals, unaware of his latent racism.

Caposcripti

Zelda Rhiando (Clare 1992)

Modern London. The photographer is a man ruled by two obsessions. First, to take photographs that speak for him. Second, to make the subjects of those pictures speak to him alone. He is not interested in them as people - their banal tales of joy and suffering. His experiments are to uncover the secrets that they don't know they are keeping.

Rewind to Peru in 1851. An explorer is battling to survive in a claustrophobic and unknown world. In flight from modernity he seeks older truths, which he finds in the customs of the Caposcripti.

From Recipients to Donors: Emerging Powers and the Changing Development Landscape

Dr Emma Mawdsley (St John's 1989), University Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Fellow of Newnham College

From Recipients to Donors examines the emergence, or re-emergence, of a large number of nations as partners and donors in international development, from global powers such as Brazil, China and India, to Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, to former socialist states such as Poland and Russia. The impact of these countries in international development has grown sharply, and as a result they have become a subject of intense interest and analysis.

Big Questions from Little People (in aid of the NSPCC)

Compiled by Gemma Elwin Harris (Christ's 1993)

Children have a knack of asking great questions: Why is the sea salty? How far away is space? Why did dinosaurs go extinct and not other animals? What is global warming? But how are we supposed to answer their questions when most of us have only a sketchy grasp of the detail?

I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone

Catherine E Bolten (King's 1999)

Utilizing narratives of seven different people - soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician - I Did it To Save My Life provides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the war that devastated their country for a decade. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival through the rubric of love, and by telling their stories and bringing memory into the present, create for themselves a powerful basis on which to reaffirm the rightness of their choices and orient themselves to a livable everyday.

The Banker Who Turned to Voodoo

Paul Williams (Fitzwilliam 1965)

A naive but intrepid young man, fresh from university in the 1960s, takes a well-paid banking job in Brazil for which he is ill-suited, at a time when the country hardly figures on the world stage. Inspired by Brazil's rich African heritage and the remarkable powers of voodoo priests to heal the sick, he gives up banking and returns to live as a research student in remote communities, examining how serious illnesses are cured by herbs, flogging and fumigation.

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