Literary Cambridge (Britain in Old Photographs)

From its earliest times to the present day at Cambridge, this small city on the edge of the Fens, has fostered an astounding array of literary talent. Some of the nation's most gifted and important writers and critics - Samuel Pepys, Christopher Marlowe, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Dylan Thomas, A.S Byatt, Colin Dexter, Michael Frayn, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and P.D. James, among many others - have walked its streets and found inspiration in the architecture and history of the city and its university. Shakespeare is even rumoured to have travelled here with a company of players and staged Hamlet in one of the city's many taverns. This illuminating collection of photographs brings to life some of those literary residents and the influential groups to which they belonged. It offers stories of well-known lives and some lost and hidden aspects of Cambridge (town and gown) to engage literary historians, weekend visitors and book lovers alike.