7 Books Like Queer Cambridge

I taught Tennyson’s major poems to university students for many, many years. I love these poems with all my heart, and what the historian and biographer Richard Holmes has done is give them back to me, fresh, vital, immediate, urgent, moving, miraculous.

Holmes demonstrates his lucid and masterful power of interpretation when he gives us a close reading of the language, form, and register of these poems. He places Tennyson in the midst of the intellectual tidal waves of his times: the religious upheaval unleashed by new scientific perceptions, the revolutionary debates on our origins with Charles Darwin at the core, the astronomical revelations of the vast universe around us.

Tennyson’s extraordinary elegy for his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, "In Memoriam AHH," is a central document in the history of Victorian poetry and should be in our times too.

This novelle, which I read for the first time this year, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing that I have ever read.

I first tried reading Stifter in the original German while at school, and failed to understand any of it. But I hadn’t read this terrifying fairy tale, which is for adults only. The narrative uses the classic tropes of the fairy tale—two children visit relatives in the next valley, and while crossing the mountains, they are lost in the snow.

The drama of the story takes place in the shift of register when the children find themselves no longer in the world of forest and fairy tale but in a realist landscape and eternal geological time on the mountain glacier.

The writing is extraordinary, uncanny, pitiless, the tension almost unbearable.

This book has the best illustrations of the two main cities of antiquity that l have ever seen. Besides superb photographs (all in colour) of the ruins today, they include Peter Connolly’s brilliant reconstructions of buildings of all sorts: houses, palaces, baths, temples, forums, hippodromes, theatres, amphitheaters, insulae (blocks of flats), bars and aqueducts, plus styles in furniture, clothing, and hair. All are shown in colourful detail, many with cutaway illustrations that recreate city life of 2000 years ago with wonderful vividness. They are complemented by Dr. Hazel Dodge’s lucid, informative text. The first part covers Athens at its democratic peak under Pericles around 434BC, the second Rome at its imperial zenith some 500 years later, when it was the greatest city on earth.

Named for the river that Julius Caesar crossed when he invaded Italy and began the civil war which brought the Roman Republic to its knees, this book offers a sweeping account of the Republic’s fall and has been rightly described as narrative history at its best. All the major characters are vividly presented, from Marius and Sulla to Pompey, Cicero and Caesar, in prose that manages to remain readable and fast-paced while spanning almost 400 pages. Tragedy is arguably more apparent than triumph, understandably in a book devoted to the collapse of the Republican order. But the glory of the Republic does also shine through, and the story is told on a larger scale than my book would have allowed.

Robin Lane Fox, best known for his books on Alexander the Great, has produced a superb overview of ancient history, from the emergence of Greece c.776BC to the Roman empire’s zenith under the emperor Hadrian (reigned  AD117-138).  He takes a firmly narrative approach, which makes for a thrilling read. His focus is on the lives of great men such as Pericles, Alexander, and Julius Caesar and on key political and military events rather than on cultural and social factors. While his epic approach may not impress all academics, it will probably still be read with enthusiasm long after more specialist works have been forgotten. Lots of illustrations, some in colour. Ideal for the general reader.

Dictionaries are not usually meant to be fun but this fact-packed book is so well-written that it is a joy to read. Wonder who on earth was Cicero? What the Punic wars were all about? How the Greeks defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis? What was so special about Greek theatre? And why  Rome conquered Britain? You will find all the answers here. Besides military and political events, it covers literature, philosophy, art, religion, sport, and society, all the way from 776BC and the first Olympic Games to the end of the Roman Empire in the west in AD476.

Simon Goldhill powerfully demonstrates why we remain indebted to the ancient world in so many ways. It is not just that classical columns often decorate our buildings or that classical legends inspire our films and books, our whole life still bears the cultural and psychological imprint of ancient Greece and Rome. Our current obsession with gyms, for example, stems from the Greek passion for exercising in public (and they did so naked). Gymnasium is in origin a Greek word. While Greeks and Romans took different views from us on numerous things, from romantic love to slavery, the issues they first confronted and debated still matter. Unsurprisingly for the ancient world, far from being peopled with dead white marble statues gathering dust in museums, throbbed with impassioned life. The echoes of their tumultuous lives haunt us still.