San Antonio College Library

At Cambridge Milton was whipped and Tennyson got drunk, Tennyson met Arthur Hallam and Ted Hughes met Sylvia Plath, Macaulay was hit by a dead cat and Henry James was nearly concussed by a punt pole. Nowhere in England outside London is richer in literary associations than Cambridge, yet this is the first complete history of creative writers in the town and University. In addition to providing an affectionate, amusing, but unsentimental account of...

The author sets out, not to prove that Chaucer was an Oxonian or a Cantabrigian, or that the characters in the university tales may be traced to historical originals, but merely to explore the correspondences between the literary cities and their citizens and the historical ones, and to illuminate some of the details of Chaucer's poetry. He reconstructs the fictional milieu of these tales using fresh archaeological evidence and newly discovered old...