Real Cambridge

Cambridge: the right brain of Oxbridge, the composite capital city of Clever. For eight centuries, this quiet English city has been one half of history’s longest-running academic arms-race, stockpiling Nobel Prizes like other places store nuclear warheads. For the title of the most intelligent place on Planet Earth, only the two Ivy League newcomers, Harvard and Yale, come close. This flat East Anglian fenland community is where Wittgenstein split hairs and where Rutherford split the atom; where Newton sought God through science, and where Darwin found that science was God; where Watson and Crick discovered the DNA that shapes our bodies, and where generations of students push those bodies to their limits. This is where the world went to college: Tennyson, Cromwell, Donne, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Stephen Hawking, most of Monty Python and nearly all of Pink Floyd. It’s also the place that gave us Association Football, Dolly the Sheep, the Night Climbers, and Katrina and the Waves. And the place where the idealistic local council put hundreds of free bicycles in the streets for the citizens to share. And they were all nicked in a week. Cambridge is the city of punts, Pimms and privilege, but Davies also finds a stranger Cambridge that will be a surprise to many of its citizens—even the really clever ones.

Grahame Davies is a Welsh poet, author and lyricist, who has won numerous prizes, including the Wales Book of the Year Award. He is the author of 17 books in Welsh and English, including:'The Chosen People', a study of the relationship of the Welsh and Jewish peoples;'The Dragon and the Crescent', a study of Wales and Islam; a novel,'Everything Must Change', about the French philosopher Simone Weil, and the popular work of psychogeography,'Real Wrexham'. A native of Coedpoeth near Wrexham, now based in Cardiff and London, he has a degree in English from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and a PhD from Cardiff University. He was awarded an honorary D.Litt from Anglia Ruskin University, and is a Fellow and Governor of Goodenough College, London. He travels internationally as a reader and lecturer, carries out numerous high-profile poetry commissions, and collaborates extensively with musical and visual artists. His poetry has been translated into many languages and has appeared in publications such as:The Times,The Times Literary Supplement,The Guardian,Poetry London, the Literary Review in America,Orbis(#136 Spring 2006),Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English,Absinthe(Michigan, USA, 2007),Kalliope (Germany, 2009),Poetry Review, and Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series Villanelles(2012).