Topic description and stories

'Swifts' lithograph from Carry Akroyd's 'Found in the Fields' series (detail)

Poet, activist, bird watcher: exploring John Clare as nature writer

29 Aug 2017

At a symposium next month (15 September 2017) academics, artists and ornithologists will share their responses to the work of 19th-century poet John...

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Making Rome great again: fake views in the ancient world

27 Jul 2017

A political leader who seeks to make his nation “great again” and a time when ‘post-truth’ rhetoric appears to support political ambitions. Not Trump...

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Figure from Mothercare, published by Truby King's daughter, Mary

Too big to cry: when war ended, the damage began

07 Nov 2015

A collection of essays edited by Drs Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy looks at the legacy of the First World War through the lens of the creative arts. As...

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Head of an albatross caught on Sep. 22 1901 by Edward Adrian Wilson

“Albatross!” The legendary giant seabird

01 Jun 2015

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, A is for...

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Rupert Brooke and Rugby Cadet Corps c.1906

“When you are in it, war is hateful and utterly horrible.” A major Rupert Brooke collection comes to Cambridge

23 Apr 2015

On the centenary of the death of Rupert Brooke, King’s College announces the acquisition of a major collection of materials relating to one of the...

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The ghostly faces under UV light

Ghosts from the past brought back to life

01 Apr 2015

One of the UK’s most important medieval manuscripts is revealing ghosts from the past after new research and imaging work discovered eerie faces and...

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Travellers under open skies: writers, artists and gypsies

30 Oct 2014

In her new book Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period , Sarah Houghton-Walker provides a fascinating insight into writers’ and artists...

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Thought

Project seeks nation’s most memorised poems to investigate power of poetry ‘by heart’

02 Oct 2014

By aiming to discover the UK’s most memorised poems, a new research project – backed by a former Poet Laureate – will explore the poems that live in...

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Swaddywell Pit near Helpston, Northants

'Besom ling and teasel burrs': John Clare and botanising

20 Sep 2014

A symposium taking place on Tuesday (23 September 2014) at Cambridge University Botanic Garden will unite artists, writers, scientists and literary...

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The Soul of an Officer, a sketch from one of Siegfried Sassoon’s journals. 1916

‘A sunlit picture of hell’: Sassoon’s war diaries go online for first time

01 Aug 2014

Siegfried Sassoon’s First World War diaries – some bearing traces of mud from the Somme – are among 4,100 pages from his personal archive being made...

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Drawer of ammonoids from the Woodwardian collection, the founding collection of the Sedgwick Museum, dating to the late 17th and early 18th century

We ask the experts: why do we put things into museums?

26 Nov 2013

Our lives are bound up with objects. Museums are evidence of our deep preoccupation with the things that surround us, whether natural or the product...

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Co. E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, Ft. Lincoln, defences of Washington.”

Forgotten poems recovered by American Civil War research

04 Oct 2013

American Civil War poetry that sheds light on a neglected chapter of the era’s literary history has been recovered and made freely available online...

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