Cambridge Alumni MagazineIssue 66 Easter 2012

In this issue:

Ways of connectingSport and luck

Shelf livesMy Cambridge

Brainiac’s delight

CAM 66 01

CAM is published three timesa year, in the Lent, Easter andMichaelmas terms and is sent free to Cambridge alumni. It is available to non-alumni on subscription. For furtherinformation contact the AlumniRelations Office.

The opinions expressed in CAMare those of the contributors and not necessarily those of theUniversity of Cambridge.

EditorMira Katbamna

Managing EditorMorven Knowles

Design and Art DirectionSmithwww.smithltd.co.uk

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Services offered by advertisersare not specifically endorsed by the editor or the University of Cambridge. The publisherreserves the right to decline orwithdraw advertisements.

Cover: Tabatha Leggett outsideFitzbillies. Photo by Steve Bond.

Copyright © 2012The University of Cambridge.

Regulars

Letters 02Don’s diary 03Update 04Diary 08My room, your room 10The best... 11My Cambridge 12In the margins 15Secret Cambridge 16

ReviewUniversity matters 39Summer reading 40Music 45Sport 47Prize crossword 48

CAM /66CAMCambridge Alumni MagazineIssue 66 Easter Term2012

Contents

Features

Ways of connecting 18When Robert Macfarlane set out from Cambridge to walk the old ways, he began to trace a network of paths – andthoughts – that weave their way across the British landscape.

Shelf lives 22The UL is both repository for physical books – a new deliveryof printed matter arrives every week – and curator ofknowledge. Lucy Jolin explores the romance of the library.

Sport and luck 26In this Olympic year, CAM asks: is success in sport down to perspiration rather than inspiration – or does luck play a fargreater role than participants and spectators might imagine?

Charity begins at home 30Dr Emma Mawdsley says that the rise of China and India is changing the way the world looks at international aid anddevelopment.

A moving story 34Why do we have a brain? Professor Daniel Wolpert says there is only one plausible explanation: to produceadaptable and complex movements.

This publication containspaper manufactured by Chain-of-Custody certifiedsuppliers operating withininternationally recognisedenvironmental standards in order to ensure sustainablesourcing and production.

Gold Award Winner 2010Robert Sibley Magazine of the

Year Award 2010

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Lara Harw

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Tate, London 2012

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02 CAM 66

Welcome to the Easter edition of CAM.Even if you have never browsed its stacks,the University Library plays a central

role in Cambridge life, and never more so than inEaster Term. On page 22, we wander the corridors to discover why libraries continue to be places ofenchantment as well as learning.

Back at CARO, the team are looking forward to welcoming the 3,743 new CAM readers who havefought their way through exam term to get toGeneral Admission, Graduation Dinner and, formany, the start of life beyond Cambridge. On page39, Gordon Chesterman, director of the CareersService, explains how for many graduates, life afterCambridge begins on Mill Lane.

On page 34, Professor Daniel Wolpert explainswhy he believes the human brain evolved to supportmotion, and on page 12, three alumni reveal what it is like to man the phones for Linkline, theUniversity’s listening service. Dr Emma Mawdsleyargues that international aid is not just about a flow of money and resources from the developed to the developing world on page 30, and on page 40, Dr Robert Macfarlane makes the case for hodology – the study of roads and routes.

Lastly, at CAM we have been boggling at the sheerdetermination it takes to get from untried amateur to honed international athlete. Cambridge graduateshave taken part in every Olympics since 1896. We celebrate the achievements of past medallists and follow the journeys of this year’s crop ofhopefuls in our special Olympic pull-out, and presenta debate on the role of luck in professional sport onpage 26. We hope you’ll enjoy them both.

Mira Katbamna(Caius 1995)

Among the stacks

EDITOR’S LETTER Your letters

The Questing Beast

I was surprised by one of thestatements made by JulianAllwood [Debate, CAM 65]: “The total output of all photo-voltaic cells yet made is probablyless than the energy used to makethem”. What source has DrAllwood used that differs from themany studies I’ve seen? ThisNREL study, for example(www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf) shows energy paybacks ofone to four years, against lifetimesfor PV of 25 years or more.

“If we really want to addressthe serious harm from climatechange,” as Dr Allwood states, I think that being as clear as wecan with facts will really help.Jamie Vollbracht (Emmanuel 2000)

Dr Julian Allwood states thatusing solar energy to generateelectricity would require hugeareas of land, and that the energyused to produce photovoltaic (PV)cells exceeds their energy output.He is incorrect on both points.

Growing biofuels to burn togenerate electricity would indeedtake up land. However, there isample space available on rooftopsto do it with PV systems. Theirproduction involves only a smallfraction (maybe 10% in the UKcase) of the energy and carbon thatthey generate. See, for example,Fthenakis et al, 2008, who foundthat electricity generation usingPV would displace 89% ofemissions from conventionalpower plants.Dr Steve Plater (Clare 1972)

The recent article in CAM by Dr Julian Allwood was timely andinteresting. I spent much of myworking life [on] fibre-reinforcedpolymer structures. With these it ispossible to place the reinforcementwhere it is needed and fabricate

the artefact with minimum waste,themes which Dr Allwoodexplores. Unfortunately thequestion we usually met was “willthe product be cheaper than some-thing made from conventionalmaterials?” I suspect that today’sworld is much the same.Neil Hancox (King’s 1959)

Dr Allwood responds: “PVinstallations have grown at 40%per year since 2000, so withanything over two year’s payback,the article’s correct. Estimating10m^2 of roof each gives ~50Weach, ~1% of our energyrequirements.” To read his fullresponse and join the debate, visitalumni.cam.ac.uk/ news/cam.

The end of the world

In a 55-year writing career, HGWells had an awful lot to sayabout the end of the world, so it’s a pity that Professor Lisboa, in herinteresting article, should mis-understand his views so badly.What Wells argued for was not theobliteration of “inferior races”,but for the notion of race at all,envisioning a world state that did not recognise as significantindividual differences innationality or ethnic origin.

While I wouldn’t want to arguefor this outcome as desirableeither, it’s worth noting thatWells’s views on eugenics weredecidedly more liberal than thoseof contemporaries such asChurchill or Beatrice Webb.Dr Simon James(Peterhouse 1989)

Lost youth

As a teacher, I found a lot of whatProfessor Katz [CAM 65] saidrang very true. There is a greattendency for both parents andchildren to feel that all activitiesshould be purposeful, rather than

CAM 66 03

Don’sDiary

Michael Ramage is a University Lecturer in the Department of Architecture and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex.

Easter Term is both exhilarating andexcruciating. Exhilarating, because as anexaminer for Architecture, I get to evaluate

student work. Excruciating, because the students Ihave taught (as a lecturer and Director of Studies)will take the exam I have written.

Will they succeed as I hope? Or will they stumbleon question three, which is a bit tricky? Did thesupervisions stick? Was it worth climbing to the top of King’s College Chapel to discuss thearchitecture, the structure, the construction andthe view? (It’s the best view of Cambridge that I know, and you can learn a lot about the growthof the city from the arrangement of the buildings.)I hope so, because it’s the highlight of the year forme: a chance to communicate the excitement oflearning new things, even from a building that’smore than 500 years old.

Speaking of age, this Easter Term is particularlyspecial because we are celebrating the ArchitectureDepartment’s first century. The first architecturelecture was given by Edwin Prior, Slade Professorof Fine Art, in May 1912. Although people oftenthink of Cambridge as unchanging, the firstarchitecture students who were starting 100 yearsago were studying in a very different kind of town.

Cambridge was not yet a city; that wouldn’thappen until 1951. Queens’ College wascompleting the Dokett Building – site of theCollege's first bathrooms, and possibly moreimportant from a student point of view, indoortoilets. (Of course, what interests me about thebuilding is its early use of reinforced concrete inthe floor slabs. Perhaps there’s an exam questionto uncover there.) Meanwhile, Sidney Sussex was just finishing its new chapel. It was designedby TH Lyon, who later designed the war memorial chapel at King's – one of the manyinterconnections of Cambridge architecture.

It’s these connections that make architectureinteresting and challenging for our students. They work hard on their portfolios, presentinggraphically not just their designs for form ofbuildings, as many suppose, but also the arrange-ment of the internal spaces, how those spacesrelate to one another, how the building relates to its surroundings, and the way in which manydetails and materials come together in a satisfactory manner.

Our students approach this in different ways, ofcourse – architecture is about imagination,intellect and practical application comingtogether, and each student brings a different focusand set of interests to the task. But our studentsspend many late nights putting the finishingtouches on their designs, made only slightly easierby the extended hours of sunlight as winter givesway to spring. Seeing the results is always ahighlight of my term.

Teaching the practical aspect of architecture isalso a pleasure. Making things with one’s ownhands has a special reward, and I try to do it asmuch as possible with my students. This term, a particular standout was the Eco-House Initiative– a student-led project to design, critique and build houses in the developing world, workingwith a large Latin American NGO. The studentsraised an impressive amount of funding from the Anglo American Group Foundation, and part of the money has gone towards building a full-sizeprototype in the garden of the ArchitectureDepartment.

Over the course of a weekend, a complete house,constructed from panels fabricated offsite a fewdays earlier, appeared outside my office window. It stayed up for two weeks as its environmentalperformance was measured, and there are evenrumours that some students slept in it to assess itscomforts. It was a remarkable achievement, andall the more impressive because the project doesnot count towards exams.

Closer to home, just north of Cambridge inWaterbeach, students have designed a bridge tocross one of the many Fenland drainage ditches, in a project in partnership with the WoodlandTrust. It will be made of coppiced timber cut fromthe trees around the site. Later in the summer, a few students will return to Cambridge to buildthe bridge. If we can manage it, we’ll also plantsome willow – which, over the next few years, we can grow into a bridge. A fitting way, I think,to welcome the next 100 years.

To join the celebrations, visit www.arct.cam.ac.uk

just for enjoyment; they expectlearning to be directed towards aspecific outcome, rather than forinterest or mental stimulation.Where, then, will be the room forintellectual curiosity?

I cannot agree with Prof Katz that“extended school hours” wouldprovide any sort of solution, how-ever. The sort of parents to which sherefers will be forcing their children topartake of whatever they deem themost suitable “enrichment” or“creative” activities provided therein– and then no doubt taking them fortheir swimming classes, violin lessonsor private tuition after that.Cath Brown (Newnham 1985)

I found Professor Katz’s article a littlesurprising. My own observations of 20-year old skateboarders, 30-yearold yo-yo champions, youths ridingtiny BMX bikes on public paths,young people staying with theirparents into their thirties and forties,and the decreasing popularity ofmarriage and parenting would notresonate with the theory offered.Surely we are suffering from achronic state of lost adulthood?

Of course, Marx is never wrongbecause his ideas are versatile enoughto fit any empirical reality, but I think he might still agree with methat the subjugation of society into a game-playing, toy-collecting crècheof permanent children is a far moreeffective form of hegemony than thatsuggested by Professor Katz. Kevin Leighton(Churchill 1988)

When all in education are beingaccused of “dumbing down” –including university entry criteria – Ithink it a little unfair.

But when I look at next year’sentrants massed behind ProfessorCindi Katz on the cover of the Lent2012 edition, I am not sure!Peter Benner(Downing 1956)

We are always delighted to receive your emails and letters.

Email your letters to:cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk

Write to us at: CAM, Cambridge AlumniRelations Office, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street,Cambridge, CB5 8AB.

Please mark your letter ‘for publication’. You can read more CAM letters atwww.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam.Letters may be edited for length.

04 CAM 66

UPDATEEASTERTERMSPORT

Cambridge at the Olympics

One minute you’re trying not toget hit in the Lent Bumps, andthe next you’re representing

your country at the Olympics. Or atleast, the electrifying progress of manyof Cambridge’s Olympic hopefulsmakes it seem that easy – though weunderstand that quite a lot of traininghas to go on in between.

As we go to press, more than 20Cambridge students and alumni arehoping to compete at London 2012,including 10 rowers, four runners,three fencers, a heptathlete, a cyclist, a diver and a sailor.

You can follow their journey to the Olympics in our special CAM London 2012 guide, and online atalumni.cam.ac.uk/Olympics. Here, you’ll discover more aboutCambridge’s extraordinary roll call of

more than 300Olympians (datingback to thebeginning of themodern Games in

1896), get daily updates on ourOlympic hopefuls and read about thefuture of sport at Cambridge.

Of course, sport at Cambridge is as much about taking part as it isabout Olympic gold medals, and we want to hear all your stories –whether they’re of sporting tragedy, or triumph or the thrill of taking part in London 2012. Share your sportingmemories and experiences, fromCuppers to winning a Blue, andfrom carrying the Olympic torch to working for LOCOG or helping as a Games volunteer, at our website.

Light Blues row to victory

The Light Blues rowed to victory in the 158th BoatRace – the most dramatic contest in many years.Cambridge won the toss, and chose the Surreystation. By the Mile Post, Oxford were leading;but 10 minutes 30 seconds in, a swimmer in thewater forced the umpire, John Garrett, to stop therace. Twenty minutes later, the race wasrestarted; and after 35 seconds, a clash resultedin Oxford’s six-man losing his blade. Cambridgewon by four-and-a-quarter lengths.

Earlier in the day, in the reserves race, Isis(Oxford) beat Goldie (Cambridge) by five lengths.

At Henley, Cambridge triumphed in the 68thWomen’s Boat Race and won the LightweightMen’s trophy, while Oxford were victorious in thewomen’s lightweight and reserve races. But forthe first time in 11 years, Cambridge werecrowned overall winners, taking the FrancombeCup for the Victor Ludorum.

Richard

Heathcote/G

etty Images

TeamCambridgeThe CAM guide to the student and alumni athletes hoping to compete at the London 2012 Olympics

Daily Mail/R

ex Features,Getty Im

ages

Top right: Olympians and brothers Laurie and Reggie Doherty(both Trinity Hall). Bottom left: Ran Laurie (Selwyn 1933). Bottom right:Tom James MBE (Trinity Hall 2002).

Farewell Peter Agar

This term saw the departure ofPeter Agar, Director ofDevelopment and AlumniRelations. The Vice-Chancellor, Professor

Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, said:“Peter Agar has providedoutstanding leadership onfundraising and alumni relations

over the past 10 years. “His success in completing the 800th Campaign

a year ahead of schedule and 20% ahead of target andhis creation of the award-winning Cambridge AlumniRelations Office are extraordinary achievements.”

Working closely with the previous Vice-Chancellor,Professor Dame Alison Richard, Agar won Universityapproval for a significant investment in alumni relations,which included a complete redesign and relaunch of thismagazine.

The revitalised CAM subsequently won the RobertSibley Award and the CASE Grand Gold Medal in 2010for the best alumni magazine worldwide – the first timethat these prestigious awards had been given to aUniversity magazine outside the United States.

Peter Agar was appointed in January 2002, havingpreviously been UK Consul General in Toronto andDirector of Trade and Investment for Canada (2000-2001). Prior to that, he was Deputy Director General ofthe CBI (1994-2000).

UPDATEEASTER TERM

Five new alumni groups

Alumni groups can be found all overthe world. The latest five groups arein Bulgaria, Valencia, Montenegro,Burma and Libya. To find out more,visit alumni.cam.ac.uk/groups

Royal Society – New Fellows

Six Cambridge academics are among the 44 new Fellows to beannounced by the Royal Society this year. They are: ProfessorsShankar Balasubramanian, DavidKlenerman, Tony Kouzarides,Margaret Scott Robinson, MarkWarner and Daniel Wolpert.

ENTERPRISENew scheme for start-ups

Cambridge is launching an investment scheme to helpsupport new companies based on University research.The initiative, which combines a Seed EnterpriseInvestment Scheme (SEIS) with an Enterprise InvestmentScheme (EIS) fund, will enable individuals to invest instart-ups linked to the University.

“While well-established Cambridge spin-outs havebeen very successful in attracting funding, the lack ofaccess to early-stage funding is a major concern,” saidDr Anne Dobrée, Head of Seed Funds at CambridgeEnterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm.“This scheme is an excellent way for alumni and friendsof the University to invest in Cambridge start-ups and bea part of the success of the Cambridge cluster.”

Visit www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk for more information.

ARCHIVE

Vatican reveals Cambridgepapers

Aselection of 100 documentsfrom the Vatican SecretArchives includes an original

copy of the Papal Bull addressed toKing Edward II, granting papalrecognition to the University ofCambridge. It was written in Avignon,where the popes resided for much ofthe 14th century.

The parchment is in perfectcondition. The entry in the leather-bound register – dated 13 June, 1318 –states that Pope John XXII accedes tothe King’s request the previous yearfor Apostolic protection of the newUniversity.

Pope John, “observant of the factthat the prosperity of nations rests inthe abundance of learned men… theadvice of the wise, and the deeds of thestrong” prays that “the University of

Cambridge may flourish... in everyacademic discipline” and grants theright to Cambridge graduates to teach“everywhere”.

The original, according to theVatican, was deposited in the Univer-sity archives in Cambridge, where itremained until the 15th century, but isnow considered lost.

The Secret Archives were begununder Pope Paul V, a Borghese familyaristocrat who had been educated as a lawyer in Perugia and Padua beforecoming to Rome. Their nucleus washis donation to the Church of his ownfamily records. This year, the Vaticanis celebrating the 400th anniversary ofthe founding of the archives in 1612.

David Willey, BBC Rome correspondent(Queens’ 1953)

CAM 66 05

UNIVERSITY

UPDATEEASTER TERM

ADVENTURE

Alumni Travel Programme

Four new masters

Four Colleges – Darwin, Caius, Emmanuel andMagdalene – have announced new Heads.

At Darwin, Professor Mary Fowler, currentlyDean of Science and Professor of Geophysics at Royal Holloway, will become the sixth Master,succeeding Professor William Brown.

Caius welcomes the distinguished chemist Sir Alan Fersht, who is currently at the MRCLaboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He will be the 42nd Master of Caius, succeedingSir Christopher Hum.

Dame Fiona Reynolds, currently Director-General of the National Trust, will succeed Lord Wilson of Dinton to become the 27th Masterof Emmanuel.

At Magdalene, Dr Rowan Williams, currentlyArchbishop of Canterbury, will be returning to Cambridge to become the 35th Master,succeeding Duncan Robinson.

Regius Professor of Physic

A new Regius Professor of Physic has beenapproved by Her Majesty The Queen to succeedProfessor Sir Patrick Sissons, who retires inSeptember. Professor Patrick Maxwell is currentlyProfessor of Medicine and Dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences at University College London. His research programme, focusing on the transcriptional control of genes by oxygen, has received substantial national and internationalrecognition and has considerable potential for translation into new therapies for patients.

Closed to the outside world for almost half a century, Burma is one of the mostbeautiful and magical countries in Asia – and Cambridge alumni now have the opportunity to travel there, in the company of an academic expert, through the

Alumni Travel Programme. Now in its 20th year, the Alumni Travel Programme has crossed the globe. It has taken

in archaeological digs in the Egyptian desert; the Galapagos Islands in the company of a leading expert on Darwin; and viewing the nightskies over the Arctic Circle guided by a professor ofastrophysics.

This year, the Programme gains two new partneroperators: Voyages to Antiquity, the award-winningsmall cruise company, and Andante, a smallspecialist tour operator owned and run byarchaeologists.

As well as offering a unique way to take part in the intellectual life of the University, the Programmehelps to support Cambridge through a donationfrom the partner companies for every booking.

For more information, download the Travel Programme brochure, Unbound, atalumni.cam.ac.uk/travel or contact CARO.

06 CAM 66

Honorary graduatesThe honorary doctorate is the highest award theUniversity can confer. This year, eight people will beso honoured. They are: Lord Judge of Draycote,Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales; Dr BrigitteAskonas, immunologist; Professor Uta Frith,developmental psychologist; Professor Sir RichardGardner, physiologist; Professor Peter Higgs,theoretical physicist; Professor Roger Tsien, NobelLaureate in Chemistry; Professor Phillip King,sculptor; and Alfred Brendel, pianist.

Dame Fiona Reynolds

Visit Sri Lanka with the Alumni Travel Programme.

DIARY

08 CAM 66

Want to know what really makes a difference towellbeing in childhood? Why our nearestneighbour, the moon, continues to fascinateastronomers? Why it’s time to rethink the GreatIrish Famine or why engineering and mathshave got everything to do with art and nudity?For the answers to all these questions youneed to get yourself to the ultimate festival ofthe mind: Alumni Weekend.

This year, the festival will open with anexclusive reception at the Fitzwilliam Museum,giving you the chance to network and to view more galleries than ever before.

Festival-goers will also have the chance tosing in King’s Chapel, to visit the University’smuseums and many of its private gardens, andto hear from top academics from across theUniversity on the issues that shape our world.

Booking for Alumni Weekend opens at theend of July. Visit alumni.cam.ac.uk/weekend tojoin the mailing list and to book online.

Festivalof the mindAlumni Weekend, 21-23 September 2012

Ben Haw

kes/PVUK

alumni.cam.ac.uk/weekend

CAM 66 09

DIARY

Open Cambridge7 – 9 September Celebrate… Cambridge’s history, architecture, art andgardens with walks and events in the city.cam.ac.uk/opencambridge

Festival of Ideas24 October – 4 NovemberCelebrate… the arts, humanities and social sciencesthrough hundreds of inspiring talks, topical debates andhands-on activities for all ages. cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas

Winter Wordfest27 NovemberCelebrate… the enduring pleasures of the written word atWinter Wordfest. It covers all genres with a fantastic varietyof events for the entire family to enjoy.cambridgewordfest.co.uk

Genetics CentenaryLecture Day7 SeptemberCommemorating the centenaryof the Arthur Balfour Chair ofGenetics at Cambridge, this one-day symposium features lectures from the current BalfourProfessor, David Glover FRS, Sir Walter Bodmer (University of Oxford) and Professor ChrisMarshall (Institute of CancerResearch) among many others.Tickets cost £40 per person andinclude all lectures, refreshmentsthroughout the day and dinner atChurchill College. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

Treasures ofCambridge8-15 September Explore the rich history andheritage of the city and Universityat a special week of eventsorganised by Great St Mary’s.Includes exclusive access tootherwise closed areas of theUniversity, candlelit dinners in thehistoric Colleges and events ledby Cambridge experts.alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

Chamber MusicConcert13 NovemberSome of Cambridge’s finestyoung musicians perform at anexclusive concert for alumni.Enjoy drinks and canapés at thisreception held at the stunningRobert Adam home of Mr BobBoas (Corpus 1957) and his wife,in central London. Tickets cost£40 per person.cums.org.uk

Festive Drinks10 DecemberThis popular annual event isbecoming a firm favourite in thefestive calendar. Network in styleat this drinks and canapésreception held in the exclusivesurroundings of Sir Paul Judge’s18th-floor apartment, overlookingthe stunning skyline of the City.This event is open to all alumniand their guests. Tickets cost £39 per person. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

Save the date!

Varsity Rugby at Twickenham6 December

Forthcoming festivals

CAROE: events@alumni.cam.ac.ukT: +44 (0)1223 332288W: alumni.cam.ac.uk

Alumni Weekend is just one in a series of festivals in Michaelmas Term, many of which are suitable forbrainboxes of all ages.

Other events

John Hegley will be appearing at Winter Wordfest in November.

Eam

onnMcC

abe

10 CAM 66

Andrew Mitchell MP says that being back in hisold first year room, U2, is strange, butwonderful. “I came here straight out of the

army – literally direct from Brize Norton. I drove upwith my four boxes of worldly possessions, unpackedand then lay on the bed. I remember very clearly lyinghere, looking at the tower of the church, and thinking‘What on earth am I doing back in academia?’.”

Back in 2012, current resident Nicola Boekstein isunsurprised to hear that U2’s somewhat retrofurnishings haven’t changed since Mitchell’s day. “Icame bottom of the ballot,” she confesses, “so therewasn’t much choice, but this was the nicest of what wasleft.” Boekstein loves the big windows and the view.“It’s so nice to lie in bed and look out,” she says. “It’sprobably one of the best things.” Mitchell agrees,joking: “I also thought one of the best things about itwas the view, but of course I enjoyed it sitting at mydesk working very hard, as we all did in those days!”

Mitchell remembers a large United Nations stickerabove the door (which later proved impossible toremove), lots of books and a record player on which he

MYROOM,YOUR ROOM

Andrew Mitchell (Jesus 1975) is an MP andSecretary of State for International Development.

Nicola Boekstein is a second year Natsci who says that if she could bequeath something toher room for posterity, it would be her rug. “It willalways remind me of this room!” she says.

Words Stephen WilsonPhotographCharlie Troman

ROOM U2, NORTH COURT, JESUS

CAM 66 11

Generally speaking,sticky things are good.Glitter glue is good.Bubblegum is good. But most important,sticky buns are good.When it comes to sweettreats, I’m a firm believerthat if you’re not lickingyour fingers and lipsthroughout the entireeating experience,something’s not quiteright.

And so, in an effort toescape exam-term bluesand delay revision for aslong as possible, I’vebeen on the lookout forCambridge’s best bun.Stickiness is, of course,the main criterion, and it’s a tough and exactingtask, as I am sure you can imagine. Coffee-shop buns, for example, are notoriously poor.I can understand whysomeone would venture to Starbucks or Caffé Nero for a tasty treat in anattempt to overcome a Week Five slump in Lent or Michaelmas term – God knows we’ve all resorted to a cheeky almond croissant before a 9amsupervision. But in exam term, mass-produced muffins just don’t fit the bill. You need something more. You need something more considered…something stickier.

Patisserie Valerie is lovely, but only if you’re prepared to use cutlery. And I maintain that revision is complicated enough without the introduction ofknives and forks. I love a strawberry tart as much as the next person, but thecream/custard/ jelly combination is too much to deal with at this time of year.

So, for the perfect bun, you need something simple, something to thepoint. You need a Chelsea bun from Fitzbillies. There’s something specialabout the glaze on this currant and cinnamon bun – something so irresistiblethat I have begun to find it almost impossible to walk along TrumpingtonStreet without popping in for a toothsome treat. At just £1.80, Chelsea bunswon’t put you out of pocket, but they will stick your fingers together, makeyour lips sugary and have your friends queueing up to hand you a tissue.

Chelsea buns are so sticky that they don’t fall apart when you bite intothem. And so even though dissertation deadlines and exam timetables are making everyone around you fall apart, you can tuck in, safe in theknowledge that this, at least, will maintain its shape.

Just make sure you wash your hands after eating one, because stickyrevision notes aren’t good.

played Bob Dylan, Supertramp and Van Morrison –but most of all, he remembers the porters. “Havingarrived straight from the army I had very short hair,stood up straight, and the Head Porter – RegimentalSergeant Major West – used to say to me, ‘All theseloutish students! At least you stand up straight, sir’. By the time I had been in Cambridge six months, myhair was long, I slouched – I was such a disappointmentto him. He was a wonderful man.”

Boekstein, has also got to know the porters ratherwell, but for a quite different reason. “All the locks onour doors have just been changed, so they lockautomatically behind us. And it took quite a while toget used to,” she confesses. “I ended up locking myselfout of my room three or four times a day and theporters had to let me back in!”

Is U2 is a good room for parties? Mitchellremembers having a particularly good time in MayWeek. “About 20 of my friends in College came alongwith a bottle. My sister had come up a day earlier andslept on the floor, and after my party we went off toanother party, and then to another,” he says. “Whenshe went back to London, I remember she looked at meat the railway station and said, ‘You are in paradisehere’. And it sort of was, really.”

As for other activities, Boekstein says that she’s beenkeeping busy helping to organise ents for the JewishSociety ball, but as a Natsci, her life is fully timetabled.“Students today are much more diligent than wewere,” Mitchell says, “because in those days you didn’thave to worry about unemployment. In my last year Iwent to very, very few lectures.” Instead, Mitchell, whoread History, says that he remembers bicycling mid-morning to the Seeley, and to the UL. “I’d go with everyintention of sitting down and working, but I’d end upbumping into someone and going to have very goodscones in the UL tearoom!”

Mitchell also spent time at the Union (where heserved as President) and stood for election to theUniversity’s Conservative Association. “There wereeight places and I tied for bottom place. Under theconstitution you had to draw straws, and I won, whichwas absolutely outrageous because Jon Baker wasmuch more experienced than me and much better ableto contribute to CUCA,” he says. “I remember walkingthrough the snow to St John’s to have dinner and think-ing, ‘This is fantastic, to be in Cambridge, in the snow,and to have won an election on the toss of a coin’.”

But other than electoral success, what would hebequeath to future inhabitants of U2? “Oh it wouldhave to be a piece of music – probably Dylan, I shouldthink. The late nights here echoed to ‘Lay Lady Lay’.”

THEBEST...BUNINCAMBRIDGE

Regimental Sergeant Major West,the head porter, used to say to me, ‘All these loutish students! At least you stand up straight, sir’

Tabatha Leggett is reading Philosophy at Girton

Steve B

ond

12 CAM 66

ED ROBERTS Looking back on my time at Linkline, I realise it was quite a privilege. It gives you this windowinto a person’s life because of the things they share withyou. I really valued that, and seeing the positive resultsyou could get: that people went away feeling so muchhappier or had worked something out for themselvesmade me feel good.

I volunteered for Linkline for six years, from mysecond year as an undergraduate and then for all fouryears of my PhD. I did it because I felt it would be nice togive something back. I had seen people here being quitestressed out and thought Linkline was a really importantservice.

Cambridge is a stressful place. There are lots ofdifferent support mechanisms, but sometimes it’sdifficult to speak to someone face-to-face or to someoneyou know; so an anonymous, confidential service likeLinkline can be very powerful.

The big issues are always quite shocking, but the calls I remember most are the ones where someone

Ed Roberts(Christ’s 2004), readNatural Sciences. He is now a juniorresearch fellowspecialising in cancerand is finishing off hisPhD.

Alisha Fuller-Armah(Magdalene 2004),read History of Art andSocial Anthropologyand stayed on to do an MPhil in Social Anthropology. She now runs her own business,Hummingbird Hall, a boutique weddingdestination inJamaica.

Lizi Foan (Girton 2007), readNatural Sciences. She now works inpharmaceuticalpublishing for theRoyal PharmaceuticalSociety.

Interviews Becky AllenIllustration Andy Potts

It’s goodtotalk

MY CAMBRIDGE

Next year, Linkline,Cambridge’s free,confidential and anonymous listeningservice, turns 40. But what is it reallylike to man the phones? Three alumni tell their stories.

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The big issues arealways quiteshocking, but thecalls I remembermost are the oneswhere someonephoned up and justsaid they werereally lonely, thatthey just hadn’tmade any friends

phoned up and just said they were really lonely, thatthey’d tried everything but just hadn’t made any friends.With the “bigger” issues – if someone calls because theythink they’re pregnant – they start thinking about theiroptions and in the end come away with some sense of a way forward. Whereas someone who is just reallylonely will often talk around it, say thank you, but you know they haven’t come away with any resolution. I found that really hard.

Linkline gave me a healthy view of the importance oftalking about problems. I’ve learned to listen well, andhow simply listening can help people come to a strongerresolution. I’m now a volunteer with Cambridge andDistrict Community Mediation Service, which providesfree mediation in neighbour and workplace disputes andto young people and their families. I wanted to keepdeveloping the skills I’d gained at Linkline and it’s aninteresting set of new challenges and a really interestingprocess, seeing it work. Sometimes you can facilitatethese amazing turnarounds.

ALISHA FULLER-ARMAH I had some of the mostinteresting conversations at Cambridge throughLinkline. During shifts you’re very focused when you’reon the phone, but when you’re not it’s a great oppor-tunity to meet people doing different subjects. Some ofmy shifts I shared with a PhD student doing research ondinosaurs, and we had conversations I’d never have hadotherwise.

I volunteered throughout my four years atCambridge. We were meant to do four or five shifts a term, although because I was the head of the womenvolunteers, I’d often do extra shifts, sometimes several a week. Sometimes Linkline worked as a respite fromstudying, but looking back, I wonder how I fitted in myacademic work. We would take books in during examtime, but that was often the busiest time on the phones.

It made me aware of the different sides of Cambridge.It’s easy to sail through your time there – it can be a picture-postcard place – but there’s an unhappy under-belly that can be easy to ignore. Rape, abuse, bullying –like anywhere else, it all happens. So volunteering withLinkline grounded me.

There are two types of calls. The first is the crisis call:people wanting someone to speak to at that moment, a listening ear. Talking through things helped groundpeople and allowed them to make calmer decisions.

The second type of caller was just lonely. They’d callus like friends for a chat and tell us about their familiesand how they were doing. We gave them a more normalexperience of Cambridge. We’d develop some sort ofanonymous rapport, and some callers phoned through-out their university careers. There’s less resolution, butthat’s why Linkline is such an important service.

Sometimes people would call you back when thingswent well: people you’d spoken to who were thinkingabout dropping out would call to tell you they’d gradu-ated. Those calls were good. And the training I had forLinkline made a big impact on me. Being able to be non-judgmental has helped me in later life. Judging peopledoesn’t help; that’s stayed with me.

I’m Jamaican and moved back when I graduated toset up my own business. But I’d also like to try andestablish something like Linkline island-wide inJamaica. There’s poor mental health here – struggle andstress – and Jamaica lacks listening services.

LIZI FOAN I volunteered for a year, in my third year.A friend was being interviewed for Linkline andalthough you’re meant to keep it secret, she told meabout it. I had heard of it – seen the posters – but hadn’tthought of volunteering before then.

I volunteered, too, because Cambridge is such a crazyplace to be at university, and so stressful at times, thatLinkline is such a needed service. It’s great for people tohave space to talk.

Because of the time Linkline operates – in two shiftsfrom 7pm to 7am – it never clashed with lectures orpracticals. And in terms of getting work done, it wasvery flexible – you could always swap shifts or takework with you.

Lots of people aren’t necessarily calling for a solutionbut to let off steam, or because they don’t want toburden their friends or be judged by them. Because it’sanonymous, you can talk completely openly; irrespec-tive of the problem, there is someone there to listen.

Linkline doesn’t direct. It’s not there to offer adviceor convince you to think in a particular way. It’s alistening service; people are free to talk and come totheir own conclusions.

You know callers are going to be distressed. I knewI was there to help but I didn’t take things personally,and I didn’t take things with me when I left the office. I rarely had calls when people didn’t feel better at theend, even if the problem wasn’t resolved, so I felt I madea difference.

The training you get is absolutely fantastic. You gettwo days’ training in teams, doing role play and lookingover case studies. Having been a Linkline volunteer hashelped me at work and in my personal life. Going intothe world of work with more experience of dealing with different people and personalities is really helpful.Having developed ways to cope with difficult situations– dealing with callers who might be aggressive ordemanding more from you than you can give – makes it easier to handle these things in everyday life. And ifpeople are struggling, I feel I can be a better friend.

The training sets you up. You’ll use it day-to-day evenif you don’t realise it. And the people you volunteer withare great, I came away with some really good friendshipsthrough Linkline. It was such a positive experience thatit’s made me keen to volunteer again in future.

Linkline will turn 40 in 2013, and would like to get in touchwith alumni in time for a reunion celebration. If you wouldlike to be added to an alumni mailing list, please emailalumni@linkline.org.uk

In the margins of the last draft of a 1906 letter to thepublisher who reneged on a deal to put Dublinersinto print, James Joyce remarked that he needed

a publisher who would be willing to take a risk. At thetime, Joyce was 24, working in a bank in Italy andkeeping a notebook about the world of commerce.

“The additions in the margins – which include severalmentions of the word risk – seem to reveal that thelanguage of banking was seeping into Joyce’s thoughts,”says Jaya Savige, a Gates Cambridge Scholar whoseresearch focuses on the rise of the concept of risk inmodernist literature. “You can see the convergence of thelanguage of finance and his own youthful formulation ofhis artistic project and sensibility.”

Savige’s interest in the emergence of modern ideasabout risk in literature stems from a line at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where StephenDedalus declares himself willing to take the risk ofexiling himself from the church and his homeland inorder to become an artist. “It struck me that a questionlingered there. What was Dedalus risking? And what isthe relationship between risk and art and literature,especially in an age dominated by the concept of risk?”he says.

The fact that Joyce worked in a bank for six months islittle known, and Savige says that his banking notebooktends to be underexamined because what he is writingabout appears relatively bland and uninteresting.“Unlike the creative notes in his other notebooks, theseare straightforward notes about banking,” says Savige,pointing out that this reading ignores the fact that Joyce is writing at a time when the debate about socialinsurance and the extent to which the state is responsiblefor a person’s welfare was just beginning.

The world of high finance has also played a part inSavige’s own academic pursuits. When he was decidingwhat to study for his PhD, the global financial crisis was in full swing. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, he feltcompelled to study something that was relevant to theglobal situation; and he found a link to the present inJoyce’s transposition of the financial concept of risk intomodernist literature. “Joyce is the great literary harbin-ger of our contemporary risk society,” he says.

Savige believes that the industry formed a backgroundfor Joyce’s future literary works – most obviously inUlysses, where the former insurance agent LeopoldBloom is constantly thinking about the insurability ofthe individuals he encounters. The mythical maritimerisks that Odysseus faces in his voyages are transplantedinto early 20th-century industrial Dublin, and the veryformat of the book – which is famously difficult to read –forces the reader to feel at sea, just as Odysseus was.

“The reader has to navigate textual and literary risks,and this is something that is emblematic of modernist

James Joyce. Artist. Banker.NOTES IN THE MARGIN

literature,” says Savige. “In this way, Joyce extends the application of the concept of risk from something that ismerely about narrative content to the form of the noveland literature.

“Sociologists like Ulrich Beck believe Western societyhas undergone a profound shift since the 17th century,when the concept of risk first emerged, to now, where a large proportion of the decisions we take on a publicand personal level are made on the basis of risk analysis.I believed that this idea of risk analysis must be reflectedin the literature of the period – and lo and behold, it is.”

Paul S

later, after Magritte.

Unlike the creativenotes in his othernotebooks, theseare straightforwardnotes about banking

Words Mandy Garner

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Words Becky AllenImagesCharlie Troman

SECRET CAMBRIDGE:

MONUMENTALMUSHROOMS

It is as if a pair of monumental mushrooms haveerupted through the floor. Comprising curvaceous,silver-grey aluminium caps supported by chocolate-

brown ceramic stalks, it’s an object that would be asmuch at home in Tate Modern as in the Department ofMaterials Science and Metallurgy (DMSM).

Look more closely at its sculptural form, however,and the object’s function begins to be revealed. Hiddenunder the cap of the right-hand mushroom are a series ofdials labelled with embossed tape. “Emission,” readsone. “Filament,” “deflectors,” “lens” and “voltage” saythe others.

For all its beauty, this bit of secret Cambridge is not awork of art, but a scientific instrument, and a piece of theUniversity’s technological heritage. Built in the 1960s bythe Swiss firm Haefely, it is a Cockcroft-Walton generator– a direct descendent of the device these two Cambridgephysicists invented to split the atom 80 years ago.

“I think it’s architecturally magnificent as well as beingscientifically very important,” says Professor Sir ColinHumphreys, director of research at DMSM. “The high-voltage electron microscope that it supplied electrons towas, at the time, absolutely world-leading.”

A fan of its pleasing proportions and the craftsman-ship of its construction, he finds the generator every bit asattractive as great sculpture. “You can walk round it andget different perspectives. It’s a bit like a Henry Moore,”he explains. “It’s a beautiful piece of scientific sculpture.”

Although Humphreys himself never used it, heremembers it being built in the mid-1960s when he was a research student at Cambridge. And it’s thanks to himthat this generator has survived. After it passed out ofservice in 1985 and the building housing it was taken overby Social and Political Sciences during the 1990s,Humphreys discovered the generator was destined for thescrapheap.

“I thought this was vandalism, and approached EstateManagement to save it,” he recalls. “They told me I couldhave it if I took it apart myself and removed it from thebuilding at no cost to them!

“I was head of the Materials Science department at thetime, and got three technicians to dismantle it. Theynumbered all the parts and reassembled it in the receptionarea of the Austin Annexe. It was a dark and dingy placeand the Cockcroft-Walton generator transformed it.”

The first version of the generator was an icon of theatomic age. Designed and built by John Cockcroft andErnest Walton in Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, theone-million-volt generator or particle accelerator enabledthem in 1932 to split the atom in a controlled fashion for the first time. It was a landmark for which they wereawarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951.

Its legacy lives on. The clever combination ofcapacitors and rectifiers that allows the Cockcroft-Walton to generate such high voltages means they are stillused as the first stage of many modern particle accele-rators, from Fermilab to the Large Hadron Collider.

And tiny versions of the Cockcroft-Walton sit in mostof our homes, according to Ernest’s son Dr Alan Walton,also a physicist at Cambridge. “The circuit is at the heartof every television set ever made,” he says. “We used tojoke with Dad that if he’d taken out a patent on it, we’dhave been as wealthy as the Gettys. Rolling in it!”

That his father was capable of constructing such a thing came as no surprise. “He was very gifted in thoseways,” Walton explains. “We always regarded him ascapable of doing anything with his hands.” His projectsincluded making a liquidiser for his wife from an oldvacuum-cleaner motor, an upturned saucepan, a set ofrotating blades and a glass goblet. (“The glass goblet wasthe only part of it he bought,” Walton adds.)

Like Humphreys, Walton loves the generator, andhopes it will be preserved when DMSM moves to its newbuilding at West Cambridge.“In the world of theoreticalphysics it is often said that fundamental equations, forexample E=mc2, are beautiful,” he says. “In the world ofexperimental physics, many of the great experiments have an elegance to them that is missing in lesser studies. The Cockcroft-Walton generator is a joy to the eyes.”

I think it’sarchitecturallymagnificent as well as being veryimportantscientifically.It’s a bit like a Henry Moore

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When RobertMacfarlane set outfrom Cambridge totravel the old wayshe stepped into a network of paths –and thoughts – thatstretched across the British landscape and its waters, linking them to thecontinents beyond.

One hundred and one summers ago,the poet Edward Thomas(1878–1917) set out to walk the Icknield Way – the ancienttrack that runs south-west from the sands of central Norfolk

to the chalk of the Chilterns. His route took him through southCambridgeshire, and he found the county’s flatness both dispiriting totraverse and fascinating to contemplate. It was, he wrote in a brilliant flourish, “very simple country…

that might have been moulded by a strong north wind when the landwas docile as snow”. The “tall chimneys of Cambridge”, which heglimpsed across six miles of “fine open corn-land”, showed as strikingverticals in the insistently lateral landscape. For crossing the county,though, he advised “elephant, camel, horse, mule, donkey, motor-car,waggon… anything except… a pair of hobnailed shoes”. It was an unusual recommendation from a man who, from a young

age, was a compulsive walker and wayfarer. Thomas possessed a pair of what John Keats once called “patient sublunary legs”, andthose legs carried him along thousands of miles of old paths, from the famous (the Ridgeway in southern England, Sarn Helen in Wales) to the local lanes around his South Downs home. Holloways, drove-roads, green lanes, coffin-routes, pilgrim-paths, Neolithictracks – Thomas followed them all, and paths came to thread subtlyand vitally through his writing.

WAYSOFCONNECTING

Painting Wood on the Downs by Paul Nash

Aberd

een Art G

allery & M

useums C

ollection. © Tate, Lond

on 2012

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Having made his reputation with a series of travelogues and naturalhistories, Thomas at last began writing poetry in the winter of 1914, atthe age of 36. In an astonishing late outpouring of art, he finished 142poems in just over two years: poems that changed the course of modernEnglish poetry, and whose branch lines are being followed still. Somecontinue to be widely known and loved – Adlestrop, As the Team’s Head-Brass – and many took paths, tracks and walking as their centralmetaphors. Thomas died on Easter Monday 1917, the opening day of the Battle of

Arras: killed by a passing German shell that sucked the air from his lungs,stopped his heart and threw him unmarked to the ground. His war diary,a document remarkable for its serenity, suggests that more poems wouldhave followed, had he survived the conflict.Four summers ago, I set out from Cambridge to walk the Icknield

Way, following Thomas’s route and carrying with me his account of hisjourney. I had become interested in his work, and also in the broaderrelationship between walking, thinking and writing. It seemed to methat this was not a subject that could be researched by sitting still, andso it turned out. That first walk began a book that would take fouryears, 1,000 miles and 100,000words to complete; and the IcknieldWay proved my entry point to a network of old routes of travel thatstretched across the British landscape and its waters, and connectedthem to continents beyond.

Istarted on Cambridgeshire chalk – and found my way to thedolerite bird-islands of the Scottish north-west, to the granite of theCairngorms and the Spanish Guadarrama, the limestone of the

West Bank (where a small group of Palestinians walked old paths asprotest against Israeli land control) and the glaciers of the sacred peaksof the eastern Himalayas (around which Buddhist pilgrims calmlymade their koras or circumambulatory pilgrimages). I researched tres-pass and access, song lines and ley lines, rights of way and rites of way. Everywhere I went, I encountered men and women for whom

landscape and walking were crucial to life. I met pilgrims, tramps,trespassers, dawdlers, mourners, stravaigers, explorers, cartographers,poets, sculptors, activists, botanists – and a man who believed he was a tree and that trees were human. I discovered that walking wasstill profoundly and widely alive as a more-than-functional act: a vitalmeans for people to make sense of themselves, to express resistance orcivil disobedience, to gain knowledge that would be otherwiseinaccessible, to seek joy or to encounter grace.Surprisingly, there is a word for people who study roads and routes:

hodologists (from the Greek hodos, meaning “path” or “way”). OnceI began looking with a hodologist’s eye, I began to see paths and trackseverywhere, in culture as well as landscape. They wind their ways inparticular through an unexpected amount of English art and literature.

They are there as the dusty roads followed on foot and horse by thepilgrims of The Canterbury Tales (which Chaucer began writing 650years ago), there in Dorothy Wordsworth’s sharp-eyed journals, therein the prose of William Hazlitt (who walked radically, making marchesfrom chapel to chapel to hear Unitarian ministers preach, andacclaiming footpaths as “lines of communication… by which the flameof civil and religious liberty is kept alive”) and in the cosmi-comicramblings of the long-distance tramp George Borrow, who ignited thewayfaring cult of late-Victorian Britain. They are there, too, in the poetry of John Clare – who wrote his

scrupulously attentive poems about the Northamptonshire landscape,and praised footpaths as “rich & joyful to the mind” – there in thepainting of John Constable, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and StanleySpencer, the music of Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams,the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and thephotography of Fay Godwin and Bill Brandt. Many of these artists share an interest in how walking and

thinking are mutually involved, and how paths might offer means notonly of traversing space, but also of feeling, being and knowing.

Surprisingly, there is a word for peoplewho study roads and routes: hodologists,from the Greek hodos, meaning “path” or “way”. Once I started looking with a hodologist’s eye, I began to see pathsand tracks everywhere, in culture as wellas landscape

Chalk P

aths, Ravilious, E

ric (1903-42) / Private C

ollection / The Brid

geman A

rt Library

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Nan Shepherd, in her slender masterpiece The Living Mountain(written in the 1940s and first published in 1977) described how shecame to know the Cairngorm massif on foot, following its ridge linesand deer tracks for years until she found herself walking not “up” but“into” the hills. Walking was essential to her method; bodily sensationenabled highly specific kinds of knowledge and vision, and encouragedan openness of encounter and an immediacy of experience. “My eyes,”wrote Shepherd beautifully and simply, “were in my feet.” The walking artist Richard Long – who once walked a shattering

33 miles a day for 33 days, from Land’s End to John O’Groats,creating an artwork nearly 1,100miles long, with the landscape hismedium and his feet the incising pen-nib, pencil-lead or brush-tip –signs off his letters with a red-ink Chinese-style stamp that shows thesoles of two feet, each of which has an open eye embedded in its centre.Many of these artists have also been inspired by the sense that time

is experienced differently while walking old paths and tracks: that itmight fold or pleat in strange ways, bringing discontinuous momentsinto contact, and creating historical correspondences that survive asterritorial imperatives, ghostly multiple exposures or spectral voices. Walking, in this tradition, becomes an act of archaeology or of

séance. Edward Thomas wrote in his poem Aspens of hearing, at the cross-roads of a path, the “clink, the hum, the roar… the whisper” of a vanished village. In Thomas Hardy’s novels, stretches of a path cancarry memories of a person, as a person might of a path. The Englishdownlands were, to John Masefield, “thronged by souls unseen / Who knew the interest in me, and were keen / That man alive shouldunderstand man dead.”One February afternoon, I received a phone call from a friend,

telling me that a set of Mesolithic footprints had been discovered onthe intertidal mudflats at Formby Point near Liverpool. I caught a trainto Formby, and arrived in time to walk the length of the footprint trail.That walk, no more than 30 yards and two minutes long, was the mostextraordinary I have ever made. The prints had been left by a man anda woman, who some 5,000 summers previously had been strolling sideby side, northwards along the foreshore at around four miles per hour.Their tracks had been pressed into the silt, baked hard by the sun, andthen preserved for five millennia by the gradual deposition ofsubsequent layers of mud and sand. They had been exposed by thescouring action of a strong tide two days before I saw them, and a daylater they had vanished, erased by the waves. Walking alongside the tracks, I also passed the slots of red deer and

roe deer, the glyphs of cranes, and a gaggle of smaller human prints:children, mud-larking while their parents foraged, centuries before thefirst Egyptian pyramid was built. The uncanniness of the experiencewas not one of time-travel (a sudden whisking back to the Mesolithic)but rather an eerie feeling of co-presence between the ancient and thecurrent. My research had begun in Cambridge, and it brought me back to

the city in unexpected ways. In the Hereford Library archives, in aribboned bundle of papers fetched from an iron-doored strongroom,I found a map from the 1930s, hand-drawn in red and black ink onsheets of tracing paper, and showing the supposed existences of anancient ley line running from Avebury in Wiltshire to MidsummerCommon in Cambridge. The map was the work of a member of theOld Straight Track Club, an organisation founded by the intriguinglylunatic Alfred Watkins in the 1920s (Watkins later authored a little-known 60-page book on the Archaic Tracks of Cambridge, whichexplained how to hunt leys in and around the city). Eventually, too, I returned also to the Icknield Way and to Edward

Thomas. The poet imagined himself in topographical terms.Landscape gave form to his melancholy and his hopes. Pathsconnected real places for him, but they also led outwards tometaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. Thesetraverses – between the conceptual, the ghostly and the personal –occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its mostcharacteristic events. Walking was to Thomas a means of personal

myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings: he not onlythought on paths and of them, but also with them. I realised that to write adequately about Thomas, I needed to

approach him not biographically but, as it were, bio-geographically: tore-tell his life and thought through and in terms of the landscapes bywhich he understood himself, and also to re-walk the paths he hadfollowed. “The hill road wet with rain,” he wrote finely in a late poem,“In the sun would not gleam / Like a winding stream / If we trod it notagain.” Thomas is undergoing a revival at present. He has been the subject

of an excellent recent biography by Matthew Hollis, Now All RoadsLead to France. Oxford University Press is issuing his selected prose insix vast and meticulously edited volumes. This coming winter, RichardEyre will direct at the Almeida in London a play about Thomas’sfriendship with the American poet Robert Frost, which developedwhile the two men were “talks-walking” (Frost’s phrase) together inthe Gloucestershire countryside. Thomas always was modern before his time. Now, as we prepare to

fight the Great War over again in memory, he and others like him have things of value to tell us about how we imagine our relationships with landscape and nature, how paths run through people as well asthrough places, and the surprising worth of the ways we walk.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton) is published this month.

Far left:Kieran Hammond, first year EnglishLiterature student, Homerton“I’m researching how the use of glovesin Shakespeare relates to contemporarydiscussions on chivalry.”

Right:Research Associate, SanskritManuscripts Project, Faculty ofAsian and Middle EasternStudies"This is a Nepalese manuscriptfrom 1645, containing a collectionof Buddhist legends called One Hundred Stories of GloriousDeeds."

Left:Chris Bell, Chief Library Assistant,Legal Deposit Department“Unpacking our weekly delivery from theAgency of the Legal Deposit Libraries -each delivery brings plenty of surprises.”

Shelf lives

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Words Lucy JolinPhotographs Charlie Troman and Marcus Ginns

‘The library didn’t only contain magical books, theones which are chained to the shelves and are verydangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinarybooks, printed on commonplace paper in mundaneink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren’talso dangerous just because reading them didn’tmake fireworks go off in the sky. Reading themsometimes did the more dangerous trick of makingfireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain.’Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

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Right:Sue Adams, Masters student in Genealogical, Heraldic andPaleographic Studies at theUniversity of Strathclyde“For my thesis, I’m combininggenealogical sources like thecensus with tithe maps, to figureout where people owned land.”

Far right:Mark King, second year PhDstudent in Medieval History,Pembroke“These are several volumes of theTransactions of the ShropshireArchaeological and Natural HistorySociety.”

Yes, a chanceencounter over a book aboutDostoyevsky didindirectly lead to my marriage...

It is 1912 and a normal working day for the staff ofthe Cambridge University Library. As they do everyweek, crates of printed matter have arrived for their

perusal: the Legal DepositsAfter putting aside the academic material, staff sort

the books, magazines and papers by size and put theninto cardboard boxes. These are not important statepapers, the diaries of a well-known novelist or learnedacademic journals. Rather, they range from The VictorRapid Record Selector (“to help you choose yourrecords more expeditiously and with greater satis-faction”) to The Scholar’s Catechism on Arithmetic andGeneral Knowledge (typical entry: “What is a gamp?”). In 1934, these boxes of apparent rubbish – but which

must be kept, by law – are moved to the new ULbuilding. They are put in the Tower, where they stayuntil 2006, when a new academic and popular interestin the minutiae of 19th-century life helps to spark theTower Project. By the end of this year, Tower Projectresearchers will have catalogued all books in the towerpublished up to the end of 1920. They are a treasuretrove for historians – a perfectly preserved record ofreading. These books, leaflets and magazines were notimportant then. But they are now. It is just one reasonwhy libraries matter: they exist for the past, the presentand the future. The boxes still arrive at the UL: more than a hundred

of them every week, containing around 1,600 books and1,500 periodicals. Who knows what the readers of 2112will make of them? Each consignment is a snapshot ofwhatever happens to be published in the UK that week –everything from Java for Dummies to Spot’s First Walk.

“Which will remain in perfect condition,” says Marjo-lein Allen, Head of Reader Services. “No child ever getsto chew our Spot books. This material is not somethingwe’d buy as an academic library. But it is part of our heri-tage, so we look after it for ever – we never throw it away.”But libraries are more than simple depository. They

exist in our imaginations and memories as much as they do as places of serious academic endeavour, as NickLangley (Fitzwilliam 1974) and still a regular UL userpoints out. “As a red-brick grammar-school boy, I foundthe University environment of the mid-70s pretty alien – which may have been partly warranted, andpartly because of a chip on my shoulder,” he recalls. “The waits after you’d filled in slips and before

the librarians brought your books seemed horribly long,especially to someone feeling hyper-self conscious andout of place, surrounded by people who seemed to fit in.I wonder how many of them were feeling just the same? I still use the University Library regularly, and have beenstruck by how helpful they are now.”The Library evokes nostalgic memories for Dom

Banham (Clare 1987). He says: “I was once wanderingaround the UL and found a section filled with books onthe history of firework making, complete with contem-porary engravings of firework-related incidents – oftenthe untimely and explosive demise of a famous factory.“None of this was in the least bit helpful to whatever

purpose I had originally gone there for, but I have stillvivid memories of reading some fascinating accounts.”And they are more than just information hubs.

“Libraries are intriguing, important, delightful, contro-versial places with wonderful pasts and interesting

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Above:Bodil Isaksen, third yearundergraduate in LandEconomy at Queens’“I am revising developmenteconomics for my finals.”

Far right:Reverend Brian Mastin,affiliated lecturer with theFaculty of Asian and MiddleEastern Studies“I’m consulting the PersepolisFortification Tablets - texts fromthe Persian Empire, written inElamite - for various grammaticalfeatures.”

Right:Henrietta McBurney Ryan,Keeper of Fine and DecorativeArt, Eton College“I am looking at the two-volumeset of Mark Catesby’s The NaturalHistory of Carolina, Florida andthe Bahama Islands.”

Left:(From left to right) DeborahFarndell, Senior Conservator;Shaun Thompson, BinderySupervisor and Lucy Cheng,Book and Paper Conservator,who says: “I’m working onfragments that are part of theJacques Mosseri GenizahCollection, a treasure trove of morethan 7000 Jewish manuscripts.”

futures,” says Professor Simon Franklin, of the Depart-ment of Slavonic Studies and Head of the School of Artsand Humanities. “But it doesn’t do to be overly sentimental about

them. I think that we can no longer get by with a slightlycosy notion of libraries. Yes, I went to the local library as a child, there was story time on Saturday and that wasvery important and exciting. Yes, a chance encounterover a book about Dostoyevsky did indirectly lead to my marriage. But people have so much more access to so much more information in so many different waysnow. The time when the library was the only access tothe world of knowledge is not there any more. It wouldbe foolish to pretend that it was.”However even in the future, there will still be the

dusty boxes. He says: “The digital zealot notion – thatlibraries are going to be completely redundant, that wewill simply have everything on a handheld device and all these great buildings can be converted – is turning out to be equally misguided. It’s a utopian or dystopianvision of the future which is as off-centre as the over-rosy view of the past.”So the argument over whether the smell of old books

trumps the feel of a shiny new Kindle is long over. Why not have both? These days libraries such as the ULare at the forefront of marrying print and digital, using the one to complement the other. Take the recent project by the UL to digitise Sir Isaac Newton’s papers.The digital archive received 29million hits in its first 24hours online. ‘For the first time in the Library’s history,”says Anne Jarvis, University Librarian, “we do notknow who our readers are. We do, however, have extra-ordinary new opportunities to engage directly with a worldwide audience. Communication remains critical,but it now takes different forms. We inform our readers

through social media and they increasingly access ourcatalogues and collections online. This is therefore a veryexciting time for the Library and its staff.”And the fact that Google can now pull up Newton’s

archive actually strengthens the case for libraries. The reason why those documents can be made availableonline is that they have spent the last 400 years beingcarefully cherished and preserved – in a library. (In fact,many papers were so delicate that they needed to berestored before being digitised.) “Nobody else has thatresponsibility,” says Professor Franklin. “Not Google,not Wikipedia, not governments. Nobody else has tothink in those long terms.”The digital, he points out, is an adequate substitute

for the object, “but it should never be mistaken for a total substitute. If we look at our screens, we assumethat everything is the same size and texture, and that amanuscript miniature is exactly the same as an enormousmural because it all fits on to your iPad. And objects areimportant not just as holy relics – though there’s an ele-ment of that – but if one is talking about serious know-ledge, rather than just information about something,then one has to work with the objects themselves.”And it is those objects that remain at the heart of the

library, for all the undoubted convenience of an onlinecatalogue of more than eight million cards and the lureof shiny screens. “Occasionally, you find a book which has been in

library since the 19th century and it’s just the book youneed, and you open it to find that nobody has even cutthe pages,” says Professor Franklin. “One might say,what an extraordinary waste to have a book there thatnobody is going to read for another 150 years. On theother hand, what a wonderful justification – suddenly,this book has meaning.”

LUCYJOLIN: It was legendary golferGary Player who first shrugged off therole of chance in his success with hisfamous maxim: “The harder I practise,the luckier I get.” So let’s start bydefining luck. It’s a slippery concept…

DAVID SPIEGELHALTER: Unpredicta-bility is a fact of life. Sometimes we cannarrow the odds and take some control,but there’s always a margin left overwhich is not in our control, in any way. If it turns out well, people call it luck.Luck is just a retrospective label thatpeople give to unpredictable things thathappen to go their way. But as soon asyou start talking about luck, people startthinking that it’s some kind of externalforce that’s guiding things, and I thinkthat’s absurd.ED SMITH:Why does it have to be anexternal force? It seems to me that you’regrouping luck and fate together. To me,they’re very different. Fate is fixed. Fateis something that you career towards, a destination – luck isn’t.

DS: So what is luck?ES: Well, if you look at games of chance,you may have a winning streak, you maynot. That seems to be luck. It’s notridiculous to admit that or to conceivethat. DS: Of course – that’s how probabilityworks, in runs. Runs of events happenmuch more often than is intuitive. If youflip a coin and you get four heads andfour tails in a row, that seems strange, sopeople think they are having runs of luck.This is how probability works in the realworld – in very unintuitive ways. We areso desperate for a sign, some kind ofunderstanding, that we start giving theselabels to things when it’s just chance. MARK DE ROND: I like to think aboutluck in terms of synonyms. People useluck and chance and serendipityinterchangeably. In science and business,we often talk about serendipity, which isreally isn’t about luck as much as it isabout people being able to meaningfullycombine observations that may not becausally related.

In this Olympic year, CAM asks:is success in sport is down to perspirationrather than inspiration – or doesluck play a far greater role than usuallyassumed?

SPORT&LUCK

DEBATE:

Ed Smith (Peterhouse 1995), author of “Luck:What It Means and Why It Matters”, is a journalistand former international cricketer.

David Spiegelhalter is the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at theCambridge Centre for Mathematical Sciences.

Mark de Rond is a Reader at the JudgeBusiness School, a Fellow of Darwin, and theauthor of the upcoming book “There is an I inTeam: What Elite Athletes and Coaches ReallyKnow about High Performance”.

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Interviews Lucy JolinIllustrations Paul Slater

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LJ: And so do you think this force is a factor in sport?ES: Luck is a massive part of success in sport. I washearing a British Olympic sailor talking about luck theother day. He said: “I have to admit that whatever I do,the wind might be against me.” But most sportspeopleshy away from acknowledging the role of luck, andthat’s natural. DS: We studied the role of luck in football. In thePremier League, the spread of points suggests the resultsare 21 per cent due to luck. But it changes the furtherdown the leagues you get. The amount of luck goes upand up and up. In some years in Scottish LeagueDivision Two, it’s almost complete chance. Thevariability at the end of the season is as if they justflipped a coin before the game to decide who wins, with50 per cent chance of a home win, 25 per cent chance ofan away win, 25 per cent chance of a draw. You can callit luck. I call it quantifying probability.

LJ: So will the Olympic hopefuls be taking luck intoaccount?MdR:You do find a surprisingly high amount ofsuperstition among athletes. I suspect it is because theyunderstand that not everything is under their controland that the margins are so small. When AdrianMoorhouse won gold for the breaststroke 100metres atSeoul in 1988, he won it by a hundredth of a second. He was still behind when he was 44 strokes into a 45stroke race.DS: There are aspects to every single situation –particularly sailing, I’m sure – which mean that themargins are so small that there is no way that the sameperson can be that consistent. ES: They’re going to be clinging to the idea that nothingis left to chance, and their training regime and theirtactics and their approach are giving them the bestpossible chance of winning. But in the back of theirminds there is some subconscious awareness that thebest-laid plans can come unstuck very quickly. DS:They try to think they are in control of everything.But of course, they are not. There’s one Olympic finalfor each sport. What would happen if they did each final10 times? It would get very tedious but I bet the sameperson wouldn’t win every time.

LJ: But surely there’s an element of making your ownluck, and fortune favouring the brave?ES: Well, you can’t make your own luck, because that’san oxymoron. If luck is beyond your control, thenwhatever it is that you’re making may be very useful andvery sensible but it isn’t making luck. You can putyourself in the way of luck, you can maximise yourexposure to luck, but it’s not quite making your ownluck. And even with “the more I practise, the luckier I get”, all Player’s really doing is getting more balls near the hole. Some are going to drop in, but that’s not actually luck. A better line would be “the more Ipractise, the better I get”.DS: When you say that someone makes their own luck,with practising and so on, that’s really just narrowingthe odds, and that’s obviously what you try to do when you’re competing: make it so that the probabilityof your failing is lower and lower. We can improve theodds, but things are never going to be certain.

LJ: So what happens when we disregard the existenceof luck?MdR: I think some people find the idea of luck quitehelpful. It helps them cope with uncertainty. It might bethe wrong thing to try and prove to people that itdoesn’t work. The same is true of superstition.ES: I was in a team that banned luck. We had a meeting.We were going to be tougher, more relentless, more self-aware than anyone else. Someone said: “I get so tired ofpeople saying ‘bad luck’ when someone’s out. It’s notbad luck, it’s just bad skill.” And the coach said: “That’sright! We’re never going to say bad luck ever again.”First game of the season, this guy hits a full-bloodedshot, right in the middle of the bat, and the fielder tookoff – it was the most improbable event you’ve ever seen.He puts out a hand, he catches the ball almost by acci-dent. The batsman trudges back to the dressing roomand there was this deathly silence. And we played reallybadly. When the natural desire to control and minimiseyour exposure to chance is taken to ridiculous extremes,it actually becomes inhuman and self-defeating.DS: The naïve use of the Black-Scholes and otherequations, which helped fuel the financial crisis,happened because people thought they could tamechance by having formulae. These are very efficientformulae – provided the world behaves exactlyaccording to your assumptions; and the world isn’talways so obedient.

LJ: And therefore it might be a positive thing to let go ofcontrol, to embrace luck…MdR: Yes – take Fleming’s discovery of penicillin.Alexander Fleming worked very hard, but he was also amessy person. It so happened that a microbe flew inthrough the window of his lab and landed on a culturedish. A microbe falls into a saucer – not such a greatevent. But for him to have noticed what happened tothat microbe – it’s an interesting combination of himbeing both hard working and messy. And yet he wasprepared enough to observe the unusual reaction on thedish. So it’s hard to exclude chance from that.DS: I like that. Things favour the prepared mind. ES: Previous generations of sportsmen were a lot moredevil-may-care. And some did pretty well with thatmindset. You also see people have a late floweringwhen, say, they’re about to get dropped, and sometimesthat is because they just let anxiety go. They just go outthere and have a go and express their skills and see whathappens. That’s an underestimated mindset. It’sprobably not optimal for your whole career, but atcertain points in their lives people do throw caution tothe wind and just play.

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Follow the fortunes of Cambridge’s Olympic competitors at alumni.cam.ac.uk/olympics

We studied the roleof luck in football.In the PremierLeague, the spreadof points suggeststhe results are 21 per cent due toluck. But it changesthe further downthe leagues youget. In some yearsin Scottish LeagueDivision Two, it’salmost completechance

30 CAM 66

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To the layperson, the general direction ofinternational aid and development may seem asobvious as that of gravity: rich countries give to

poor ones. But according to Emma Mawdsley, a seniorlecturer at the Department of Geography, the realitymakes for a rather more complex and intricate mosaic.“Many people tend to believe that it is only the

Global North – the industrialised, developed countries –that give money to the South, the unindustrialised,developing ones,” she says.

“But what this misses is the huge, bubbling array ofactivity that has been going on for decades betweenSouth-South partners in all sorts of ways. Until about2005, the role of these other countries was almostinvisible to most Western policymakers, developmentprofessionals and academics of both mainstream andcritical hues. I was as guilty as anyone of that.”Mawdsley’s work focuses on the large number of

states outside the traditional Western donors as agentsof international aid and development. These include thetwo giants of the Global South, India and China;regional powers such as South Africa and Saudi Arabia;nations undergoing accelerated industrialisation, such as Turkey and Thailand; and former Eastern Bloccountries including Poland and the Czech Republic. Nonetheless, one axis of development cooperation

tends to dominate any discussion on the topic. “There isa problem that everyone gets obsessed with China, andparticularly what China is doing in Africa,” she says. “I wrote a paper on this a few years ago, looking at howthe British broadsheet newspapers portrayed China’splace in the continent. It’s very interesting: as soon as the Chinese were mentioned, the West’s role, past andpresented, tended to be sanitised.“Even with authors and columnists who in other

respects could be quite critical of some aspects of the West’s role in Africa, the moment China was in the picture, we were the good guys. It was a case of ‘We might have made mistakes in the past, but ourcolonial role was at least mixed. We were exploitative,but we were also concerned about their souls, and webrought peace and development. The Chinese don’t care about that, just the money’. These stereotypes – of the West and China – continue to shape people’s ideas of development relations today.”

Words William Ham BevanPhotographs Marcus Ginns

Charity begins

at home

CV

1989Matriculated at St John’sCollege, Geography

1996Commences PhD under thesupervision of Dr StuartCorbridge

2001Fellowship at the CarnegieCouncil for Ethics andInternational Affairs(CCEIA), New York, USA

2003Lectureship and SeniorLectureship at BirkbeckCollege, University ofLondon

2006Lectureship and SeniorLectureship (2009) atCambridge University

2011Ron Lister VisitingFellowship to the Universityof Otago, New Zealand

Dr Emma Mawdsleysays that the rise of China and India is changingthe way the world thinks about international aid and development.

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Many such commentators have characterised theactions of China – together with such agents as Iran,Saudi Arabia and Venezuela – as using “toxic aid” to promote their own national interest at the expense ofpoorer countries. An opposing viewpoint, espoused by some activists and academics, is that any challenge to the aid cartel dominated by Western donors is to be welcomed. By this reckoning, it represents a long-overdue rebalancing of global power, offering recipientnations exposure to alternative approaches to economicgrowth that may well prove effective.Mawdsley believes that neither view constitutes the

whole picture, and that a whole patchwork of ideologies,practices and outcomes must be taken into account –some positive, some less so. In the case of China, shepoints out that Western observers are apt to confuseinstances of aid with those of trade, and judge them bythe wrong yardstick. “We don’t, for example, confuseShell’s investment in Nigeria with aid, and then holdthem up as self-interested, manipulative aid givers. Bothneed to be judged in this case as corporations andbusinesses, not donors.”And there is evidence that Chinese investment is

making a significant difference to some African nations.“A lot of what they’ve done is seriously impressive,” she says. “Whether we like it or not, they’re doing what a lot of Africans want. They’re often much better than we are at driving GDP growth and providing the biginfrastructure – roads, power, jobs – for it. “What the West has done in the past 15 years has

attempted to be progressive, looking at social indicators,health and gender; and all that is very important, but theWest may have taken its eye off the ball in terms of theunderlying engine of growth. The Chinese are helping toindustrialise Africa in a way that 19th-century Britainwas industrialised. “Now, we tend to think of development as this

rather pleasant process, taking in gender empowermentand smiling children being given clean water. But development can be pretty ugly. It can be alienatingand both ecologically and socially destructive. You canlose community, languages, cultures and environmentalsustainability. And certainly, the Chinese are notparticularly good at acknowledging that there are losersin the process, such as pastoralists, forest dwellers,fishing communities and ordinary working people.”However, it is the other leviathan of the Global South

that has been a focus of Mawdsley’s work over the pastseven years. India has calibre in developmentcooperation that stretches back to its first decade ofindependence, when it began to provide assistance forNepal and Bhutan. Later work with Asia and Africa was couched in ideals of solidarity between Third World and Non-Aligned countries; and more recently, a booming Indian economy has prompted a greateremphasis on trade and investment, notably with themineral-rich nations of west and central Africa.But, as Mawdsley explains, Indian development

cooperation has always presented itself as different fromthe model practised by the West. The country has always rejected the idea that it is providing “foreign aid”– a notion that it associates with neo-colonialist inter-ference in sovereign affairs. She says: “The dominantpublic discourse of foreign aid in the West, which isalmost impossible to shake off, is that it is an act of virtue– an act of charity to the less fortunate. “That’s not a bad thing, but it locks aid into a

problematic framing that then becomes quite hard forgovernments to defend – such as when you have peoplelosing their jobs in Britain, a lot of hardship and cuts and so on. It also obscures the multiple ways in which we get something back for our aid. In India, the discourse is dominantly win-win, mutual benefit, solidarity andempathy rather than sympathy. I think that’s a mucheasier sell for their governments, and it is more appre-ciated by partner countries.” She has just completed a pilot study examining the

public perception of such schemes within India and theresults have proved interesting. “India doesn’t do a lot topublicise its development partnerships,” she says. “But a lot of Indians know, for example, that their countrybuilt the Afghan parliament building. They take pride inIndia’s external presence and profile. There’s a sense thatIndia has made it and is becoming the powerful nation italways should have been, and that development partner-ships can help to project that.” Mawdsley first came up to Cambridge in 1989, as a

Geography undergraduate at St John’s. After completingher PhD, she spent a decade working at Durham Uni-versity and Birkbeck, University of London. She returnedto Cambridge in 2006, to become a Lecturer at theDepartment of Geography and a Fellow of NewnhamCollege. She says: “I’ve always had two main strands ofwork: Indian environmental and regional politics, andthen development politics more broadly. These cametogether a few years ago: I was doing some research andwriting on China-Africa, and that bandwagon wasalready starting to roll quite fast. But my expertise was inIndia, and it occurred to me that people weren’t writingmuch about India-Africa.” A British Academy grant helped her to address this

imbalance, and to bring a similarly minded colleague,Gerard McCann, to work on the topic in Cambridge.Their collaboration yielded a book on India in Africa,and she is now putting the finishing touches to a newvolume, From Recipients to Donors: Emerging powersand the Changing Development Landscape. “Everythingfrom international relations, political economy andcultural and anthropological theories has been deployedin this book, to look at donors as diverse as Hungary,Thailand, India and Brazil,” she says.The scope of the book sounds vast, I suggest.

Mawdsley laughs, and says: “It’s ambitious, but one ofthe best things about geography is that we often seethings in the round – it’s an inherently interdisciplinarysubject. Nevertheless, I think there is still an imageproblem with geography. Most people labour under arather old-fashioned view of the subject. When I describemy work, people are often fascinated, and say to me, ‘I had no idea that geographers did that’.” Certainly, her current work bridges many spheres of

academic interest, and turns a whole raft of pre-conceptions about international development on theirhead. “The growing awareness of long-standing South-South aid and development cooperation transgresses ourconscious and unconscious categories and assumptionsabout who gives aid to whom: who ‘does development’.And in some ways, you could argue that development isthe ultimate tool of superiority – ‘we develop you’. “It’s not that these other countries are never guilty of

that, for all the rhetoric of South-South collaboration,equality, solidarity and partnership. So now we need tounpick their assumptions, politics and cultures – it is awhole new realm, almost untouched until five years ago.”

Many characterisethe actions of China as “toxic aid”but Mawdsleypoints out that we don’t confuseShell’s investmentin Nigeria with aid, and then hold them up as self-interested,manipulative aidgivers

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CAM 66 35

If you think about it, movement is the only way we have to affect the worldaround us, whether it is in foraging for food or attracting a waiter’s attention.Indeed, communication – be it speech, gestures, writing or sign language – areall mediated through the contractions of muscles. While sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, they are only so because they eitherdrive or suppress future movements. There can be no evolutionary advantageto laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the colour of a rose if itdoesn’t affect the way you are going to move later in life.

Essay Professor Daniel Wolpert

W hy do we have a brain? Not allspecies on our planet have brains. So for neuroscientists, if we

want to understand how the brain works, a fundamental question is why we evolved one. When I ask my students this question, theytypically say it is to enable us “to perceive theworld” or “to think”. But that is completelywrong. We have a brain for one reason only:to produce adaptable and complex movements.There is no other plausible explanation.

A moving story

Professor Daniel Wolpertwas elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society (FRS) in 2012,and has recently received a Senior Investigator Awardfrom the Wellcome Trust topursue his research. He is a member of the Departmentof Engineering.

Illustration Matthew Richardson

CAM 66 37

As you can tell, I am a self-confessedmovement chauvinist. I believe movement is themost important function of the brain, and tounderstand movement requires us tounderstand how perception, memory andcognition affect action. However, the effortlessease with which humans move – our arms, oureyes, even our lips when we speak – masks thetrue complexity of the control processesinvolved. This is evident when we try to buildmachines to perform human control tasks.While computers can now beat grandmasters atchess, no computer can yet control a robot tomanipulate a chess piece with the dexterity of a six-year-old child. To understand brainprocessing could therefore lead to dramaticimprovements in technology. In our group in the Department of

Engineering we use theoretical, computationaland experimental studies to investigate thecomputational principles underlying skilledmovement in humans (we study undergraduatesas a representative sample of human-kind). A major area of our research programme is tounderstand how the brain deals with theuncertainty inherent in the world and in ourown sensory and movement systems. We onlyknow about the world through our senses, but they provide information that is usuallycorrupted by random fluctuations (known asnoise), which lead to variability in ourperceptions. For example, if you put one hand under

a table and try to localise it on top of the tablewith your other hand, you can be off by severalcentimetres. Moreover, when we act on theworld through our movement system, thecommands we send to our muscles are alsocorrupted by a variability that leads to move-ment inaccuracy. Or, as every darts playerknows, trying to aim for the same spot over andover again leads to a large spread of the darts.Therefore, this combined sensory andmovement variability limits the precision withwhich we can perceive and act on the world.Remarkably, society rewards those who canreduce their overall variability. If you canreliably hit a small white ball into a hole severalhundred yards away using a long metal stick,the financial rewards can be enormous. However, it is not only society that cares

about reducing variability. Our work has shownthat the brain works hard at reducing theuncertainty and variability in its perceptionsand actions. We have shown that our brainsimplement a branch of mathematics known asBayesian Decision Theory. The fundamentalidea is that you want to generate beliefs aboutthe world – so what are beliefs? Beliefs could be“Am I looking at a cat or a fox?” or “Are myarms in one configuration or another?” And inthe Bayesian world we are going to representbeliefs with probabilities – that is, with anumber between zero and one, zero meaning “I don’t believe it at all” and one meaning “I amabsolutely certain”, with numbers in betweengiving the grey levels of uncertainty.

The key idea to Bayesian inference is that you have two sources of information fromwhich to generate beliefs. You have data – andin neuroscience, data is what we sense from the world. But there is another source of infor-mation – memory – which can give you priorknowledge. You can accumulate such know-ledge throughout your life. And the point aboutBayesian decision theory is that it gives you themathematical tools to determine the optimalway to combine your prior knowledge and yoursensory inputs to generate new beliefs.An intuitive example will be familiar to the

average tennis player. If you want to estimate(generate a belief) about where the approachingball is going to bounce, Bayes’ rule tells youthere are two possible sources of information.There is sensory evidence – you can use visualinformation and sound information to make an estimate. However, as your senses are notperfect, there will be variability in where youthink the ball is going to land, and you canassign a probability to each location. That is the information available on the

current shot, but there is another source ofinformation only available from repeatedexperience in the game of tennis: that is, that the ball doesn’t bounce with equal probability over the entire court during the match. If you are playing against a very good opponent, they may distribute it close to the edge of thecourt making it hard for you to return. Both these sources carry important

information. And what Bayes’ rule says is thatyou can combine the sensory evidence on thecurrent shot with your prior knowledge to makethe optimal estimate of the bounce location.Indeed, in a similar laboratory-based task wewere able to show that humans are Bayesianlearners, meaning they represent the statistics ofthe outside world and know about the varia-bility in their own sensory apparatus, allowingthem to optimally combine prior knowledgeand sensory evidence to generate beliefs.

But beliefs are of no use to us unless theydrive actions, so the second part of BayesianDecision Theory is the decision and subsequentaction. There is a problem. Tasks tend to besymbolic – I want to drink, I want to dance – butthe movement system has to contract 600muscles in a particular sequence. In fact, there isa big gap between the task and the movementsystem that could be bridged in infinitelydifferent ways. For example, even in a simplearm reach there are in fact an infinite number ofpaths along which I could move my hand. Evenif I choose a particular path, I can hold my handon that path with infinitely different jointconfigurations.But it turns out that we are extremely

stereotypical. We all move in pretty much thesame way. So why is it that we move in theparticular ways we do? In reality, perhaps wedon’t all actually move quite the same way.Maybe there is variation in the population. Andmaybe those who move better than others havegot more chance of getting their children intothe next generation. So in evolutionary scales,movements get better. And perhaps in life,movements get better through learning. So whatis it about a movement that is good or bad? We have shown that it is the variability in our

muscle contractions that is critical to the choiceof a particular movement. So when I want my arm to do something, there is a randomcomponent that perturbs my movement awayfrom what I desire. However, it turns out thatdifferent ways of moving to the same finallocation engender different amounts ofvariability. Indeed, a model we developed whichproposes we move in a way to minimise thenegative consequence of such random fluctu-ations, thereby minimising variability, was ableto explain a wide range of movement patterns. In summary, our brain evolved to control

movement. The major intellectual challenge isto understand how we do that. Not only willsuch an understanding be applicable to robotictechnology, but it is also highly relevant for the many diseases which affect movement.By understanding the normal processes thatunderlie control, we aim for a better under-standing of disease processes, leading to betterevaluation, treatments and rehabilitationtechniques.

You can view Professor Wolpert’s TED talk attinyurl.com/4xxquv4. For more information goto www.wolpertlab.com

38 CAM 66

University Matters 39Gordon ChestermanDirector of the University Careers Service

Summer reading 40CAM asks a star panel of alumni and academics for their summer reading recommendations

Music 45Gerald Finley, baritone

Sport 47Women’s Cricket

Prize crossword 48Capital Letters by Schadenfreude

Review

CAM 66 39

The Careers Service was founded in1900. Back then we listed postings – formen only, of course – throughout the

world: in India, for a good shot to rid an areaof tigers; in Rhodesia, managing a tobaccoplantation; in Montevideo as a shipping agentfinding cargos for tramp steamers.

Today, the world is a smaller place andBritain has lost her empire but ‘becoming glo-bal’ is still a key aim for many organisations.As a result, in addition to serving over 3,000UK-based employers, the Careers Service isbecoming more global too, and has a majorrole promoting graduate-level opportunitiesaround the world to our UK and internationalstudents and postdoctoral researchers.

Recent changes in government policy toreduce the UK’s immigration have made itharder for our international students toremain in the UK. The Careers Service now hasan even greater duty to help them secure workacross the world (while still serving our homemarket – Cambridge-based hi-tech companies,London-based professional firms, companiesin manufacturing and engineering, the mediaand publishing and not-for-profitorganisations).

There are currently 7,200 internationalstudents from 130 countries studying atCambridge, including 870 from China, 800from America and one each from Namibia,Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. They will all enjoythe benefits of having acquired a degree at theworld’s best university and, in addition, willreturn home with an understanding (and anaffection, we hope) of our culture, a fluency inEnglish and many lifelong friends. However,some will be at a slight disadvantage in theimmediate employment market, having beenaway from home for three years, missingopportunities to meet potential employers,network and get beneath the skin of the localemployment market.

However, to cover all employment sectorsfor all 130 nationalities, would be a big askfor the Careers Service team to handle alone. We therefore rely heavily on collaboration andcooperation with many others. EverySeptember, working with the Careers Servicesat Oxford, Imperial and the London School of Economics, we host a series of careersevents in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong for our four universities’ students to meet local

employers. By collaborating we can offeremployers the chance to meet four times thenumber of students had we worked alone. Andwith larger student attendances, we attractmore employers and with more employers weattract more students and so on.

During our busy Michaelmas term we welcome an experienced Careers Adviser from the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology to spend a week with us. During theirstay they face a packed schedule, meeting ourAmerican students who are looking to returnhome for a career in academia or business.

In addition, there are few countries notrepresented by an active and enthusiasticstudent-run society at Cambridge. Several ofthese run informal career networking eventsand the Careers Service team willingly offertime and effort to support these events tocomplement the work of the Service.

But despite these critical efforts, our mainsource of information and help for ourinternational students has come from you –the huge network of Cambridge alumni in theUK and, increasingly, throughout the world.Many readers of CAM will have willinglyvolunteered to join our GradLink contactsystem. This password protected web-basedservice gives a brief career summary of over1,200 former Cambridge students and theiremail addresses. All are willing to be contacteda few times a year by current students askingone or two questions about career trajectory,their current or previous employers, the skillsand nature of their current role and so on.It is not intended as a way to recruit currentstudents, although we regularly hear of jobsbeing secured as a result of an initial GradLinkconversation.

Similarly, if you are running an organi-sation with graduate-level vacancies to fill, orinternship positions to offer, especially thosebased abroad, please let the Careers Serviceknow. We will advertise these vacancies foryou, free of charge, on our website, accessibleonly to Cambridge students and recentalumni. Every year, over 15,000 current stu-dents and researchers use this website, inclu-ding 87% of final year students. And throughthese listings recent graduates and researchershave taken up opportunities as computationalchemists in New York, medical researchers in Cameroon, academic research positions in Hong Kong, and environmental and foodproduction researchers in Shanghai, furtheringtheir own success, and that of their employer.

University Matters From tigers to technology

There are currently 7,200international students from130 countries studying atCambridge, including 870

from China, 800 fromAmerica and one each from

Namibia, Tajikistan andUzbekistan

Gordon ChestermanDirector of the University Careers Service

Patrick M

organ

GradLink careers contact system

Share your career story:If you would like to share your career story and offer advice by joining GradLink, visit www.careers.cam.ac.uk/gradlink

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40 CAM 66

CAM 66 41

BooksSummer reading

Chris Blackhurst (Trinity Hall 1979)Editor of The IndependentI normally take a huge pile of books on holiday– maybe I should take a Kindle instead. I’veonly skim-read Dial M for Murdoch: NewsCorporation and the Corruption of Britain byTom Watson and Martin Hickman (AllenLane), so I’ll be taking that on holiday. I seemto be doing nothing but having to talk abouthacking and Leveson at the moment. We’renot even anywhere near criminal cases yetand we’re going to be living with this for yearsto come. As a primer for how the whole thingstarted, this book appears to be essentialreading.

Another book I plan to take is When ChinaRules the World: The Rise of the MiddleKingdom and the End of the Western World,by Martin Jacques (Allen Lane). It came out in2009 but it’s been updated for 2012. It’s anexplanation of how China has become suchan economic source. What’s alarming aboutthis book and makes it more compelling isthat we’ve always thought that the Chinesemight adapt to become like us – but we mighthave to adapt to become like them. I’ll besitting by the pool contemplating that.

I always like William Boyd and don’t think

I’ve ever read a bad one. Waiting for Sunrise(Bloomsbury) has been extremely wellreviewed. He’s a very good storyteller andthere’s always plenty of challengingintelligence – and he holds together narrativeextremely well. Another book I have on mypile is Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem:The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). I’ve been to Jerusalem and found the wholeexperience completely riveting with the colli-sion of religions in one place claiming it fortheir own. There’s no city in the world like it.

Professor Margaret Robinson

Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow inClinical Biochemistry The thing I really love for bedtime reading is popular science. Periodic Tales: TheCurious Lives of the Elements by HughAldersey-Williams (Viking) is my bedtimebook at the moment. My first love as a childwas my chemistry set, and although now I’mreally a biologist, I’ve always been interestedin the elements. This book describes them inan anecdotal, entertaining way. Anotherpopular science book I’m planning to read,which I’ve been lent by a student, is TheEmperor of All Maladies: A Biography ofCancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (FourthEstate). My student says it’s fascinating froma historical point of view.

The book I’m really looking forward to – so much that I will probably finish it in a fewhours – is The Beginner’s Goodbye, the latestby Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus). I love hernovels and I want to wait until I have somereally nice holiday time to read it; I don’t wantto gobble it up. It’s deceptively simple writingand there’s not much plot, people say – but Ifeel I know her characters better than people I really do know, sometimes. Her subject,family, is so universal and speaks to anybody.

Amanda Craig (Clare 1978)NovelistMy favourite book so far this year isBecoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst(Harvard University Press). Not only is itwritten with a meticulous, scholarly attentionto detail – just by focusing on all his mentionsof blacking, he teases out insights intoCharles Dickens’s feelings about hischildhood, for instance – but every page isilluminated by insights into the way a novelistthinks and develops. It’s so good, sobeautifully written and so wise that it feels like

a novel itself. Dickens has been a majorinfluence on my own writing, especially aboutLondon, and Becoming Dickens was ratherovershadowed by the publication of ClareTomalin’s biography; but it is better, in myview. For children of nine-plus, I recommendTim Willocks’ Doglands (Andersen), a sort ofGladiator for dogs, full of tragedy, violence,excitement and love. Unlike Gladiator, it endshappily, but it also makes any reader thinkabout what dogs do for us, and how badlymost humans treat them.Amanda Craig’s most recent book is Hearts andMinds (Abacus)

Dr Rowan Williams (Christ’s 1968)Archbishop of Canterbury and Master-Electof Magdalene CollegeRichard Sennett’s Together: the Rituals,Pleasure and Politics of Co-operation (AllenLane) is a typically lucid and wonderfullywide-ranging essay on those things that areonly enjoyed by being enjoyed together – a major contribution to current questioningsabout society and economics. And SimonCritchley’s The Faith of the Faithless:Experiments in Political Theology (Verso) is ina different league of sophistication from mostrecent attempts to define what acceptableresidue might be distilled from traditionalreligion in a contemporary political ethic. Bothoffer crisp and bold proposals about how weurgently need to rethink what we are taking forgranted about human flourishing.

Sarah FranklinProfessor of Sociology Call The Midwife: A True Story of the East Endin the 1950s, by Jennifer Worth (Phoenix) –the book on which the BBC series is based –is amazing. I have been buying it on Amazonto give to people. Worth says in the book thatit always struck her as odd that so little majorliterature or art or theatre represents theexperience of being born, which is true, withthe possible exception of Tristram Shandy. I liked her attempt to depict why giving birth is so fundamental. It’s a shame that the topicsI research – new reproduction technologies –tend to generate quite a bit of bad writing.

At the moment, I am reading a veryinteresting book called Debt: The First 5,000Years, by anthropologist David Graeber(Melville House). It’s an absolutely fascinatingaccount of why credit is so fundamental to the way economies work – it’s obviously very timely. Also fascinating is A Good Man,

What will you be packing in your suitcase (ordownloading onto your e-reader) this summer? CAMgathers recommendations from a panel of alumni andacademics

WordsOlivia GordonIllustrations Lara Harwood

CAM 66 43

CAMCard holders receive a 10% discount on all book purchases at Heffers in Trinity Street,Cambridge and online atwww.alumni.cam.ac.uk/camcard

by Leon Speroff (Arnica Publishing). It’s abiography of Gregory Pincus, the scientistwho developed contraception. He was anearly innovator of public engagement – and itwas appropriate that he did so – but he wasahead of his time in terms of the socialaspects of science and I think he paid a highprice for that.

Also, there’s Ann Oakley’s book, A CriticalWoman: Barbara Wootton, Social Scienceand Public Policy in the Twentieth Century(Bloomsbury Academic). This is an amazingstory about a Girton graduate who was alsoan economist, one of the founders ofcriminology, one of the first female membersof the House of Lords, and a very inspiringperson generally – a pacifist, and an earlyadvocate of empirically based social policy(she was the first to demonstrate that capitalpunishment has no deterrent effect).

Margaret Mountford (Girton 1970)Businesswoman and former adviser to SirAlan Sugar for the BBC series The ApprenticeWhat do I intend to read over the summer? DJ Enright’s revised version of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation of Volume 1 of Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (Vintage). I confessed to someone that I had never gotbeyond the first couple of pages of Proustand I was told that this translation wouldensure that I did, so I’m going to have anothergo. Also, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians,Muslims and Jews, by Mark Mazower (HarperPerennial), which has been lent to me by a Greek friend and which deals with a part ofGreece about which I know very little. Andhaving met a former Girtonian called ValerieCollins in Barcelona at the weekend, I intendto read In the Garlic (Santana Books) – whatlooks like a very amusing guide to Spain andits customs, written by Val and TheresaO’Shea.

Joanne Harris (St Catharine’s 1982)NovelistAt the moment, I’m reading The UnlikelyPilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce(Doubleday). It’s a terrific book, comic andsad and very honest, about a man’s journeyon foot to the bedside of his dying friend.Harold is a wonderfully-drawn character –Rachel Joyce’s playwriting skills are verymuch in evidence here – and his story is at thesame time emotionally gruelling and yetultimately uplifting. I think it’s going to winprizes.

Tim CraneKnightbridge Professor of Philosophy and aProfessorial Fellow of PeterhouseI tend to avoid philosophy books when I’m onholiday. They’re too tiring. History books arefar more relaxing – they tell you things that have really happened instead of howpeople think the world should be. The sort ofthing I really enjoy is A Concise Companion toHistory, edited by Ulinka Rublack (OUP). I don’t have time to read it at the moment butmy plan is to take it on holiday. It looks ratherbeautiful, with essays by a whole bunch of Cambridge people on things like power,commerce, gender and communicationsthroughout the whole of history. It’s interest-ing for me to see how world-leading histor-ians like Christopher Bayly, Peter Burke andPat Thane see their subject.

Like a lot of people I’m interested in theSecond World War, and I can devour as manybooks on the subject as publishers provide.One I really want to read is called SavageContinent: Europe in the Aftermath of WorldWar II by Keith Lowe (Viking), about howthings started to fall apart in Europe after thewar. My summer research reading is going to be a book by John Hawthorne and DavidManley which has just come out called The Reference Book (OUP) – it’s about therelationship between language and reality. It’s not really for beginners but it’s a majorstatement in my field.

Sarah WorthingtonDowning Professor of the Laws of EnglandI like books about how the brain works. Thebook that I started a while ago and am findingfascinating is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking,Fast and Slow (Allen Lane). It’s thought-provoking because it makes you realise thatyou make assumptions that the world works a particular way – he gives dramaticillustrations of how often you make a mistakeor how often you’re right without being awareof the thought process. It’s one of those read-slowly-and-digest books.

If I came back in another life, I’d like to beeither a novelist or an architect. And if I couldbe a novelist, I’d want to write like JosephineHart. I love novels with high emotionalcontent, but I like them to be tightly written.So when Hart wrote Damage (reissuedrecently as a Virago Modern Classic) I wasblown away. I still remember how, in the early1990s, I started it on the train from Cambridgeto London, and when I got off at King’s Cross I sat in the station until I’d finished it. Chapterone is the most powerful way to start a novelI’ve read for a long, long time. I don’t knowwhether the books I’ve bought for holiday –My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young (HarperCollins), and Say Her Name byFrancisco Goldman (Grove Press) – will comeanywhere near that, but I’ve got high hopes.

Richard Sennett’s Togetheris a typically lucid andwonderfully wide-rangingessay on those things that are only enjoyed by beingenjoyed together

CAM 66 45

It felt like I’d entered a cultural time warp,”recalls Gerald Finley (King’s 1980) of hisfirst experience of Cambridge. “After my

fresh, modern upbringing in Montreal, it wasas if I’d gone to sleep and woken up in thisincredible atmosphere of centuries-oldtradition and architectural beauty. I wasfascinated, shocked and amused by all thesocial nuances and stratifications; and ofcourse I had to tolerate mockery of my accentuntil I made vigorous efforts to absorb myselfinto the British landscape!”

Although he agreed to limit his singing tochoir duties in his final year (“It took me along time to realise degrees were ratherimportant at a university”), the Canadianoutsider had already impressed with hisoutstanding vocal potential, not least whensinging the bass solos in the St MatthewPassion in King’s Chapel alongside Janet Bakerand Ian Partridge. “Bach’s music was crucialto me in those days – a huge part of what I wasand what I became. The bass aria from theMagnificat was an audition piece for King’schoral scholars; and as an undergraduate Isang the solos in the St John Passion and the B-minor Mass for the Bach Society. But overtime, as I did more and more opera, I foundmyself reluctantly leaving Bach behind.”

Thirty years later, at his vocal peak, Finleyis one of the world’s most versatile baritones,admired for the beauty of his voice – darklymellow in timbre, yet with a hint of steel amidthe velvet – his musical intelligence and hismagnetic stage presence. As his operatic careerevolved, so Bach has yielded to Mozart: Figaro– his debut role – then Papageno, Guglielmo in Così, Don Giovanni and, most recently, thatother predatory aristocrat, Count Almaviva.

“Those five roles have underpinned myenjoyment of singing,” he says. “I later tookon Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, and had a briefassociation with Marcello in La bohème. But you catch me now post-Sachs [Wagner’sNuremberg cobbler-philosopher in DieMeistersinger], by far the most demandingoperatic part I’ve ever undertaken!”

Confounding those who predicted that hiswarm lyric baritone would lack the requisiteWagnerian heft, Finley regularly drewstanding ovations for his intensely movingportrayal of Sachs – Wagner’s most sympa-thetic male character – in David McVicar’s

2011 Glyndebourne production of DieMeistersinger. “I admit that Hans Sachs hadn’tseemed an inevitable career path. And apartfrom singing Wolfram [the minstrel-knight inTannhäuser], I was a Wagner virgin, unlike somany big-voiced singers who come to Sachswith a lot of Wagnerian water already underthe bridge.

“It’s an enormous role, of course, totallingsome 6,000 words. For most of my career I’vetried to balance concert singing, lieder recitalsand opera. Sachs satisfied all three strands,and absolutely demanded that I sang the best I possibly could, using all the tools in my toolkit. It stretched me as never before.”

When we speak in May, Finley is jugglinglieder – another Schumann recording,following his Dichterliebe, plus a Winterreiseat the Schubertiade in the Austrian Alps – witha return to the Vienna Staatsoper as CountAlmaviva. Further Wagner roles beckon in2013. Meanwhile, in the autumn, he slidesback down the social scale with a return toFigaro, at the New York Met.

Has Finley’s Sachs – a role it’s impossible to emerge from unchanged – affected histhinking on Mozart’s irrepressible barber-cum-valet? “Well, both characters want thingsto be in good order for the balance of thecommunity. Figaro is a philosopher in his waywho initially thinks he has all the answers, butthen needs Susanna to straighten him out.After Sachs I’ll be bringing a more matureconception to Figaro. He’ll be more chastened,more complex – and he’ll certainly appreciateSusanna a lot more in the end!”

MusicGerald Finley

Gerald Finley: a CD shortlistSchumann Dichterliebe and other Heine songs (with Julius Drake) Hyperion CDA67676Britten Songs and Proverbs of William Blake(with Julius Drake) Hyperion CDA67778Mozart Così fan tutte (cond Rattle) EMI 556170-2Mozart Le nozze di Figaro (DVD) (cond Haitink) NVC 063014013-2

CAMCard holders receive a 10% discount on all CD purchases at Heffers Sound in Trinity Street,Cambridge.

Baritone Gerald Finley reflects on his apprenticeship at King’s and the challenges of Wagner’s longest role.

WordsRichard Wigmore

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Top:Gerald Finley in the role of Hans Sachs in last year'sproduction of Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg.Bottom:Gerald Finley and Johannes Martin Kranzle in therole of Sixtus Beckmesser.

It’s the return to grass, rather than thearrival of swifts or swallows, that signalsthe approach of summer for Emmanuel’s

second-year engineer Helen Webster.At the beginning of the Easter term, the

current crop of 20 members of the Women’sCricket Club get together at Fenner’s forCricket Week. “It’s a week of intense trainingto sharpen up our fielding and make sure we’reready for the season,” Webster explains. “Weget some practice on the grass, which is a bitdifferent from indoor nets during the winter.And we really enjoy getting back outside.”

Wicket-keeper and batsman Webster tookon the role of club captain this year after a very

successful 2011 season, which culminated in a win against Oxford in the 50-over VarsityMatch at Lord’s Cricket Ground. “Last yearwe bowled Oxford out for just over 50 andthen knocked off the runs pretty quickly. Two of our bowlers took nine wickets betweenthem – they were on top form,” she says.

Indeed, playing at Lord’s – as well asbeating Oxford – was one of the highlights ofher first year. “Varsity was on one of thehottest days of last year,” she remembers.“When we arrived at Lord’s, England captainAndrew Strauss was having a net on thenursery ground with Graham Gooch – you geta feel for the prestige of the place. It’s the home

of cricket. It’s a privilege to play there andwe’re very fortunate they invite us in.”

Despite the sport’s elegant image, it is thetension and team work that Websterappreciates. “It’s such a great game, and it’snever decided until the final ball’s bowled,”she says. “It’s a game that can swing veryquickly from one side to another and everyoneneeds to be at their best to pull off a win. You can’t just rely on one or two people,because if an opening batsman gets out, therest of the team has to step up and score runsas well.”

But it is her brother she has to thank forfirst getting her interested in the game. “I went to a girls’ school where cricket wasn’treally on offer, but when my brother startedgoing to our local cricket club, I wanted to gotoo. He seemed to be enjoying it a lot and itlooked fun.”

Even though Webster has 10 years ofcricket under her belt, the women’s club atCambridge welcomes those who have neverpicked up a bat, as well as more experiencedplayers. “We always want to encourage newpeople to play,” she says. “It’s an easy way to get into the sport compared with joining a local club, which can be quite intimidatingbecause everyone’s good. And because theCambridge women’s squad is small, evennewcomers to the game stand a good chance of making the team.

“The standard of men’s cricket atCambridge is extremely high. While we mighthave a couple of players who aren’t veryexperienced, if they train hard, they can stillmake the Varsity squad – whereas in the men’ssquad there are very experienced players whoare still only in the second team,” she says.

Differences in power and strength, too, setthe women’s game apart from its malecounterpart. “You often see quite a highstandard of technical ability in the women’sgame because we’re lacking the brute force,”Webster explains.

“Because we don’t score as many fours andsixes, there’s a lot more running between thewickets, so you need a reasonable level offitness. You’ve also got to bowl consistentlygood lines and lengths because unlike the men,we can’t rely solely on pace to get batsmenout.”

And coming as it does in the Easter term,the cricket season also provides welcome relieffrom revision. “It’s a really good way ofescaping from the stress and hype of revisingfor exams,” she says. “I love getting out there– it’s a good break and relaxing, and the resultsof the cricketers last year show it doesn’t doany damage to your grades. You just need tohit the right balance.”

www.cucc.net/pages/women

SportHelen Webster, Cricket

Words Becky Allen

Charlie Trom

an

CAM 66 47

48 CAM 66

One word must be removed fromthe last few clues before solving.The first and last letters of these words spell out two thematiclocations. The wordplay in each ofthe remaining clues generates theanswer to be entered in the grid plusan additional letter. These lettersspell out the names of someCambridge alumni who share acommon thematic achievement.Solvers are required to highlight allthe cells suggested by the title inconjunction with one of the above

locations. Before doing thisthey will need to change threeunchecked cells, providing newwords, one of which is a variantspelling of the original. The threereplaced letters and the new lettersform the title of a relevant magazine and a university fellow,respectively. Chambers 2011 isrecommended, but does not give 1 across which is in the OED andSOED, nor a referencedforename—in earlier editions.

ACROSS1 These gypsy caravans provide

Viagra and pass on a regularbasis (6)

5 Embarrassed sailor left oldtavern (6)

10 Lecturer on good terms withnobleman of legitimate descent(6)

12 Look in rock base formembranous growths (4)

13 “Very ordinary” coversWoman’s society page (5)

14 Force head to conceal gold (6) 15 Intimate minutes get

progressively shorter (7, 2words)

17 Display Welsh girl topless, likeApril? (7)

19 Profligate unionist in a dressinggown (4)

20 Harry Llewellyn for examplefinally chose to venture out (7)

22 Autocrat is anxious about Rex(6)

24 Six pursuing gas trial atInverness (6)

25 Troy managed this cripplingreverse (7)

30 Withhold assent to alienentering two wings (4)

31 Nasal passages reflect ananonymous echo (7)

33 This may be raised in surprisewith eye turning on you twice (7)

34 Outside pen pig demolished oneof Szewinska’s dishes (6)

35 Turned component definitelynot always readily available (5, 2 words)

36 Consequently leave followingimportant date (4)

37 First class school’s opening withfewer corridors (6)

38 These’ll help teacher improve inreligious instruction and acting(6)

39 Poet’s to sanction being withoutfemales (6)

DOWN1 In detail mercilessly criticize five

veristic works (8) 2 Soul to long for Don, the US

movie star (6) 3 Repudiate god with vulgar name

(6) 4 Second prize given by the Queen

is comparatively simple inappearance (7)

6 Tightrope walker not at home:she’s changing the spotlights (7)

7 Hawaiian party following a runat Calgary? (4)

8 A gown son Jack removed fromHattie perhaps (6)

9 Jock’s to lift explosive close tofuse over Texan’s metal bar (5)

11 Number seven to finish with ahooter (5)

16 Timothy goes inside to showposterior piece of mechanism (6)

18 A salt mostly irritated byexpression of triumph (6)

21 Rising star carrying firearmwarrants (8)

23 Idiot on throne holdingelectronic weapon (7)

24 An article I understand, to speakas a non-believer (7)

26 Weary soldiers at the front allretreat (6)

27 Book written in restrained,economical and too relaxedlanguage (5)

28 Dutch composer died veryheartbroken (6)

29 Medicine men indecently handlewomen stopping when excited(6)

30 Ovid’s no heart meeting atreacherous person (5)

32 Nothing in pass is free fromsudden excitement (4)

All entries to be received by 7 September, 2012Send completed crosswords: • by post to CAM 66 Prize Crossword, CARO, 1 Quayside,

Bridge Street, Cambridge CB5 8AB • by email to cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk• or enter online at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam

1

13

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25

30

34

36

38

2

15

26

10

18

3

32

11

23

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4

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CAM 66 Prize Crossword

Capital Lettersby Schadenfreude

�

Winner: David Agg (King’s 1981)Runners-up: Ted Defley (Pembroke 1968) and joint entrants Dr Martin Bright (Selwyn1995) and Nicola Bright (Clare 2001).

Of the many entries we received, only 25 were entirely correct.

Highlighted yellow cells left vacantin the initial grid permit themovement of P, P, P, Q as shown bythe final poition of white pieces inred and black in black, in oneversion of the so-called fool's matein chess (1. f4 e6. 2.g4 3.Qh4 mate).The six replacement answersshaded red are the mates/partnersof the clued fools/comedians.GENAE is in OED.

Solution to CAM 65 CrosswordMind your Ps & Qs by Ifor

The first correct entrant will receivea copy of The Official History of theOlympic Games and the IOC:Athens to London 1984 to 2012(Mainstream, £40), the onlyparallel, chronological history ofboth the IOC and the Games, byDavid Miller (Peterhouse 1953).Two runners-up will also receive£35 to spend on CUP publications.

Solution and winners will be printed in CAM 67 and postedonline on 14 September atwww.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam

FOOL’S MATE