A road trip to Jerusalem; flying a Fitzwilliam sledging flag in the Arctic; 13th century student rent wars; biodiesel, the Passion, the Boat Race, and more: Optima 18 is available now.
Download the new issue of Optima (PDF) >>
Four alumni meet up to reminisce about their road-trip across Europe and the Middle-East, forty-eight years after it happened; and three old friends who met studying anthropology at Fitz talk about where the subject has led them. Dr Rosemary Horrox discusses the development of Cambridge University and the early clashes between ‘town and gown’.
And the regular round-up of books by Fitzwilliam members cover a typically huge range of subjects – click on the links below to see online details of the books featured in this issue.
- Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War by John Stubbs
- Norman Naval Operations in the Mediterranean by Chuck Stanton
- Houdini and Conan Doyle by Christopher Sandford – who has also received considerable attention and acclaim for The Rolling Stones: Fifty Years – published this week. He has reviewed fellow Fitz alumnus Alastair Hignell’s book Higgy for the Journal of the Cricket Society.
- There, Where The Pepper Grows and The Seduction of Silence by Bem Le Hunte
- Religion and Modern Society by Bryan S. Turner
- Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine by Fellow David Nally
- Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue
- Breast Cancer: Recent Advances in Biology, Imaging and Therapeutics, edited by Susan Done
- New Collected Poems by Bye Fellow Clive Wilmer
And Harry Jones’s poetry features in AUP New Poets 4 - his poem Swimming is reproduced below!
Swimming by Harry Jones
Swimming, I count each lap
Stroke by stroke, exhale
Number in a rush of breath -
All evens on my back – where
I follow the progress of the moon
Declining into daylight blue.
If this were all there were
To it – physique, number, a blank
Heaven – but it’s not.
The mind that perceives, the hand
That pulls, float on depths
That do not light with morning.
Beneath, beyond, the unlit dark
Shadows my progression,
The lengths I aim at, my comfortable
Limit, final number - shadows
My touch to the wall, my climb
Into immediate nakedness.
Posted: 16 July 2012