Cambridge Notebook #15

Easter, Ex Libris, and reasons to be cheerful

‘Ex Libris’ at Cambridge University Library (spot the initials B and R ).

Hello, and Happy Easter to all who celebrate. Do you have a T.B.R. pile to get through this holiday weekend? Cambridge University Library has fourteen of them, in bronze, arranged in a straight line at the front of the library. Harry Gray’s ‘Ex Libris’ (2009) sculpture is also referred to pragmatically (if less romantically) as the ‘book bollards’. I knew that the books in the four central stacks could be rotated independently (students and visiting kids love this) but hadn’t noticed the engraved letters ‘B’ and ‘R’ before I took this snap. Can you work out what the other letters might be? (Clue: it’s not ‘T’.)

Just visible in the background is a red K3 phone box from the 1930s (repurposed as a book drop facility) and a poster for Curious Cures: Medicine in the Medieval World, the UL’s current exhibition. It includes some amazing material, including proof that women’s medical knowledge was not considered to be less than men’s until the founding of Oxford and Cambridge universities, from which women were of course excluded. If you enjoyed British Library’s ‘Medieval Women: Voices and Visions’, you will love this. Until 6 December 2025 (free, booking required).

This time last year I wrote about books set in Cambridge, and it’s still one of my most popular posts. This week I was delighted to receive new suggestions for further reading below, including Margery Allingham’s Police at the Funeral (1931), Andrew Taylor’s The Anatomy of Ghosts (2011) and the ‘Lodgings in Trinity Lane’ essay in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951), about his time as a student in Cambridge following the First World War.

• Do you have any time for student pranks? Students at Gonville & Caius were once famous for them, including placing a van on the roof of Senate House, the University of Cambridge’s ceremonial building, in 1958. Last month the hour hand of a college clock, which had been missing since the 1930s, turned up unexpectedly. You can read the full story here.

• It’s the Cambridge Literary Festival next weekend, and I’m looking forward to the annual ‘Room of One’s Own Lecture’, to be given this year by Professor Frances Spalding. There are lots of other great talks too, with 20% off all remaining tickets if you book using this code: EASTER25.

• If you’re in London, don’t miss the Royal Academy of Art’s ‘Astonishing Things’, an exhibition of works on paper by the French poet, novelist and dramatist Victor Hugo. Not known for his modesty, he was endearingly dismissive of his art. ‘These things people insist on calling “my drawings” were made in the margins or on the covers of manuscripts during hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of the ink in my pen.’

  Rebecca Marks
  has written about the exhibition, with gorgeous illustrations, here.

• ‘“It doesn’t do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be”: writing an Oxford murder mystery in the shadow of Dorothy L. Sayers.’ This talk by Anna Beer promises to be excellent: Somerville College, Oxford on 8 June 2025 ( you can also book to attend via Zoom). I’m a fan of Beer’s Eve Bites Back (2023), so I’m looking forward to her first novel, Death of an Englishman (Book Guild, 2025) as an accompaniment to Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) set in a fictional version of Somerville College.

  

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Recommended reading: tears & cheers

Is there a poem or a book that moves you to tears? Historian

Helen Castor

wants to know. I enjoyed her lovely post on crying, with links to three songs and a poem. ‘A Letter from Loneliness’ is a beautiful and very touching personal piece by

Mary Roblyn

on approaching two years of widowhood: ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me, foster-child of silence and slow time?’

This week has also been a warmly nostalgic one, reading-wise. I enjoyed this elegant post by Marguerite Rosefern, ‘The Call of Silence’ (‘I learnt to ski in Switzerland, and how to hold myself like a lady in navy nun schools where for generations, Hermès scarves flocked like so many silken birds’);

Lady Metroland

on her enduring love of Joan Hickson;

Wendy Varley

’s school trip memories and

laura thompson

’s passionate defence of Agatha Christie.

Welcome to Substack,

Rachel Johnson

, who has written movingly about her artist mother and the lasting value of a personal paper archive:

The other day, I was watching the final of the Masters at midnight. At every hole I’d watched Rory McIlroy get out a notebook from his back pocket, and scribble away, or pore over the contents... It gave me the feeling I get when I peg out washing on a line on a sunny day or stick my fingers into some batter to make scones. A feeling of rightness, just in the continuing existence, and utility, of such things as clothes pegs, or a biro and a pad.

The thought of that slim notebook made me want to cheer, as did McIlroy’s long-awaited victory, of course.

I admired this punchy display of brightly lit, daffodil-yellow cheeriness in Heffers’ bookshop this week, and the wisteria and purple lilac blossom that is starting to appear in my garden. So I’d love to know, what, if anything, has cheered you up this week? And is there a book or poem that you return to when you want to have your spirits lifted? Thank you for reading!

Coming soon on 20th-century book club, a post introducing R.C. Sheriff’s A Fortnight in September about a London family’s holiday in 1920s Bognor Regis. I hope you’ll kick off your shoes, imagine it’s sunny wherever you are, and join us.

What exactly is a middlebrow novel, anyway?