Fiction
In Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes (1976), Cambridge becomes ‘Fame-Bridge’, the gilded gateway to worldly success. A TV adaptation brought this satire to a wider audience, as another did for Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue (1974), in which the arch-reactionary college porter, Scullion, by dogged resistance ultimately triumphs over a reforming, politically correct master, accidentally killing him and being elected in his place, despite being stricken paralytic and non compos mentis.
As Graham Chainey has noted in his A Literary History of Cambridge (1986), very little fiction treats it ‘as a serious place with intellectuals living there’ or concerns itself with the realities of student life, although the first half of Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby (2007) does do just that. Cambridge-bred authors have, however, found the city a suitably Gothic setting for crime fiction. In Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death (2007), the 12th-century Jewish community is collectively accused of child murder. Margery Allingham, herself educated at the Perse School, made her cerebral sleuth Albert Campion a Cambridge graduate. Her Police at the Funeral (1931) features a fictional university dynasty, the Faradays, who live in Socrates Close, off Trumpington Road. In T H White’s Darkness at Pemberley (1932) the Master of the mythical St Barnabas College, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Queens’, is revealed as a cocaine addict. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Avenging Angel (1990) revolves around threatening letters – in Latin. Ivo Stourton’s The Night Climbers (2008) exploits the university’s most spectacularly peculiar pastime.
Non-fiction
Noel Annan, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses (1999)
Mavis Batey, The Historic Gardens of Oxford and Cambridge (1989)
C R Benstead, Portrait of Cambridge (1974)
Karen Billows, The Cambridge Cookbook (1995)
Richard Bird and Dona Haycraft, The Gardens of Cambridge (1994)
Michael Black, A Short History of Cambridge University Press: 2nd ed (2000)
Stephanie Boyd, The Story of Cambridge (2008)
Peter Bryan, Cambridge: The Shaping of the City: 2nd ed (2008)
C N L Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol IV, 1870–1990 (1992)
Nicholas Chrimes, Cambridge: Treasure Island in the Fens (2009)
Ross Clark, Cambridgeshire (1996)
Alan Cobban, English University life in the Middle Ages (1999)
Chris Elliott, Cambridge: The Story of a City (2001)
G R Evans, The University of Cambridge: A New History (2010)
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Portraits: From Lely to Hockney (1978)
Laurence and Helen Fowler, Cambridge Commemorated: An Anthology of University Life (1984)
Peter Fox (ed.), Cambridge University Library: The Great Collections (1998)
Martin Garrett, Cambridge: A Cultural and Literary History (2004)
Anton Gill, How to be Oxbridge: A Bluffer’s Handbook (1985)
Nancy Gregory, Cambridge Inscriptions (2006)
Peter Harman and Simon Mitton (eds.), Cambridge Scientific Minds (2002)
T E B Howarth, Cambridge Between Two Wars (1978)
Gordon Johnson, University Politics: F.M. Cornford’s Cambridge and his advice to the young academic politician: 2nd ed (2008)
Frida Knight, Cambridge Music (1980)
Damian Riehl Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge: Vol I: The University to 1546 (1989)
Elisabeth Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge (1996)
V Morgan and C N L Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge: Vol II: 1546–1750 (2004)
W C Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life, (1998)
Richard Mason (ed), Cambridge Minds, (1994)
D J McKiterick, The Making of the Wren Library: Trinity College, Cambridge (1995)
Charles Moseley and Clive Wilmer, Cambridge Observed: An Anthology (1998)
Peter Pagnamenta, The University of Cambridge: An 800th Anniversary Portrait (2009)
Rowland Parker, Town and Gown The 700 Years War in Cambridge (1983)
Stephen Parkinson, Arena of Ambition: A History of the Cambridge Union (2009)
Sarah Payne, Down Your Street: Central Cambridge (1983); East Cambridge (1984)
Michael J Petty, Images of Cambridge (2006)
N Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Cambridgeshire: 2nd ed (1970)
Tim Rawle, Cambridge Architecture: 2nd ed (1993)
Nicholas Ray, Cambridge Architecture: A Concise Guide (1994)
F A Reeve, Victorian and Edwardian Cambridge from Old Photographs (1971)
Peter Sager, Oxford and Cambridge: An Uncommon History (2005)
Norman Scarfe, Cambridgeshire (1983)
Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge: Vol III 1750–1870 (1997)
Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker, Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits (1996)
John Steegman, Cambridge as it Was and as it is Today (1940)
Frank Stubbings, Bedders, Bulldogs and Bedells: A Cambridge Glossary (1995)
Liba Taub and Frances Willmoth (eds.), The Whipple Museum of the History of Science: Instruments and Interpretations (2006)
Kevin Taylor, Central Cambridge A Guide to the University and Colleges: 2nd ed (2008)
Rodney Tibbs, The University and Colleges of Cambridge (1972)
Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (1998)
Robert Willis and John Willis Clark, The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge: Vols I-III (1886, reissued 1988)
Hilary Wayment, King’s College Chapel Cambridge: The Great Windows: Introduction and Guide (1982)
Denys Arthur Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge (1955)
Denys Arthur Winstanley, Later Victorian Cambridge (1947)