Issue 104

Poems. Plays. Short stories. Novels, all sorts. Whether published in The Mays, on stage at the ADC or entered for one of the many College prizes, student writing in Cambridge fizzes with energy and experimentation. How could we resist?

Take some carbon dioxide and throw in a little water. Add sunlight and chlorophyll. What do you get? Oxygen, sugar… and the key to life on Earth. Photosynthesis is the plant superpower, and this ability to convert light energy – the most abundant energy source on Earth – into chemicals is what keeps us humans alive. But what if we could develop a hack that allows us to siphon off some energy from this process? Are clean energy systems that rewire photosynthesis actually such an improbable idea?

Everything humans do is in History,” says Regius Professor of History Chris Clark. “It’s like the largest imaginable novel, the richest treasure house of human material you could possibly ask for.” And History as a field of human inquiry is as old as, well, History itself. Its written beginnings lie among Ancient Egyptian records of the pharaohs, the analyses of Herodotus and Thucydides, the lively narratives of China’s ‘Grand Historian’ Sima Qian. In 1724, History became a formal subject of study at Cambridge with the founding by King George I of the University’s Regius Professorship, held by Clark for the past decade.

Back in 1819, one Colonel Fletcher sent the then Home Secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, a cartoon entitled The British Constitution. It depicted the Constitution as the skeleton of John Bull, the personification of England, pierced with the cruel arrows of National Debt, Lost Liberties and Officers of the Crown, among others. Alongside him lie, discarded, Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Habeas Corpus Act – “The Proud Barriers to Ministerial Tyranny overthrown for the convenience and shelter of Villainous Traitors”. An exhortation reads: “Countrymen! Behold with Aching Hearts your once noble fat & jolly Kinsman, Mr Bull!”

From learning to use temperamental Soviet telex systems while nursing a vodka hangover to sharing recipes with the babushki of Kazakhstan, the year abroad has been opening the eyes of Cambridge modern language students for years. Here are their stories from around the world in 365 days.