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

To have your book considered for inclusion, please submit your publication's details.

Please note: to have your book considered for inclusion, its publication date must be either upcoming or it must have been published during the current calendar year. Unfortunately, we cannot include any details of books published prior to the current year.

The Mountbattens

The Mountbattens

Andrew Lownie (Magdalene 1981)

A major figure behind his nephew Philip's marriage to Queen Elizabeth II and instrumental in the royal family taking the Mountbatten name, Dickie Mountbatten's career included being Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia during World War Two and the last Viceroy of India. Once the richest woman in Britain and a playgirl who enjoyed numerous affairs, Edwina Mountbatten emerged from World War Two as a magnetic and talented charity worker loved around the world.

The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age

The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age

John Woolf (Downing 2008)

A radical new history of the Victorian age: discover the truth behind The Greatest Showman and meet the forgotten and extraordinary freak performers whose talents and disabilities helped define an era. On 23rd March, 1844, General Tom Thumb, at 25 inches tall, entered the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace and bowed low to Queen Victoria. On both sides of the Atlantic, this event marked a tipping point in the nineteenth century - the age of the freak was born.

Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature

Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature

Rebecca Varley-Winter (Clare 2005)

This book begins with the question: How are literary fragments defined as such? As a critical term, ‘fragment’ is more of a starting-point than a definition: Is part of the manuscript missing? Is it grammatically incomplete, using unfinished sentences? Is it made to look unfinished? ‘Fragment’ and ‘fragmentation’ have been used to describe damaged manuscripts; drafts; notes; subverted grammatical structures; the emergence of vers libre from formal verse; texts without linear plots; translations; quotations; and works titled ‘Fragment’ regardless of how formally complete they might appear.

Writing the Prison in African Literature

Writing the Prison in African Literature

Rachel Knighton (Girton 2013)

This book examines a selection of prison memoirs by five renowned African writers: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ruth First, Wole Soyinka, Nawal El Saadawi and Jack Mapanje. Detained across the continent from the 1960’s onwards due to their writing and political engagement, each writer’s memoir forms a crucial yet often overlooked part of their wider literary work. The author analyses the varied and unique narrative strategies used to portray the prison, formulating a theory of prison memoir as genre that reads the texts alongside postcolonial, trauma, life-writing and prison theory.

The Great Game in West Asia

The Great Game in West Asia

Mehran Kamrava (King's 1984)

The Great Game in West Asia examines the strategic competition between Iran and Turkey for power and influence in the South Caucasus. As much of the world's attention has been diverted to conflicts and flashpoints near and far, a new great game has been unravelling between Iran and Turkey in the South Caucasus.

Inside the Arab State

Inside the Arab State

Mehran Kamrava (King's 1984)

 The 2011 Arab uprisings and their subsequent aftermath have thrown into question some of our long-held assumptions about the foundational aspects of the Arab state. While the regional and international consequences of the uprisings continue to unfold with great unpredictability, their ramifications for the internal lives of the states in which they unfolded are just as dramatic and consequential. States historically viewed as models of strength and stability have been shaken to their foundations.

Troubled Waters: Insecurity in the Persian Gulf

Troubled Waters: Insecurity in the Persian Gulf

Mehran Kamrava (King's 1984)

The book’s primary research question explores the causes of chronic insecurity in the Persian Gulf? The Persian Gulf remains one of the most heavily militarized and insecure regions in the world.

The Impossibility of Palestine: History, Geography, and the Road Ahead

The Impossibility of Palestine: History, Geography, and the Road Ahead

Mehran Kamrava (King's 1984)

This book tells the story of Palestine. This is a story that has been told many times before. But while the story itself is not new, its retelling and its conclusions are. Palestine, this book maintains, is neither viable nor possible any more. This lack of viability is due to developments that go beyond its mere physical and territorial dismemberment. It is on this issue, namely the growing noncontiguity of the West Bank because of Israeli settlements, that most existing conclusions of Palestine’s lack of viability are based.

Gateways to the World: Port Cities in the Persian Gulf

Gateways to the World: Port Cities in the Persian Gulf

Mehran Kamrava (King's 1984)

The Persian Gulf region has become home to some of the world's fastest growing, most impressive cities, many of them with global aspirations. Gateways to the World presents an in-depth, systematic, and multi-disciplinary approach to the study of these cities. It begins with a broader look at how the emergence and significance of cities along the Persian Gulf waterway should be contextualized.

"St. Clive:" An Eastern Orthodox Author Looks Back at C.S. Lewis

"St. Clive:" An Eastern Orthodox Author Looks Back at C.S. Lewis

Christos Hayward (St Edmund's)

“St. Clive:” An Eastern Orthodox Author Looks Back at C.S. Lewis, adopts an unusual perspective because most examinations of the spirituality of C.S. Lewis come from Western spiritual perspectives, and few adopt the approach of C.J.S. Hayward, who opens his book with a Lewis-type series of letters to a guardian angel, “The Angelic Letters: a Heavenly analogue to The Screwtape Letters.” The book is even more distinctive in reflecting back on Lewis from a perspective meant to be thoroughly Orthodox.

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