Description: Queer Cambridge recounts the untold story of a gay community living, for many decades, at the very heart of the British Establishment. Making effective use of chiefly forgotten archival sources - including personal diaries and letters - the author reveals a network that was in equal parts tolerant and acerbic, and within which the queer Fellows of Cambridge University explored bold new forms of camaraderie and relationship. Goldhill examines too the huge influence that these individuals had on British culture, in its arts, politics, music, theatre and self-understanding. During difficult decades when homosexuality was unlawful, gay academics - who included celebrated literary and scientific figures like E. M. Forster, M. R. James, Rupert Brooke and Alan Turing - lived, loved, and grew old together, bringing new generations into their midst. Their remarkable stories add up not just to an alternative history of male homosexuality in Britain, but to an alternative history of Cambridge itself.
Brief description: Simon Goldhill, FBA, is a Professor of Classical Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where he is also Director of Studies in Classics. One of world's best-known authors on ancient Greek literature and culture, and their reception in the modern West, he has written more than twenty books which have been translated into twelve languages and won three international prizes. He has lectured and broadcast around the world on both radio and on television.
Review Quotes: '... a well-written and lavishly illustrated study. ... Recommended.' S. J. Stillwell Jr., Choice