Martlet 2015

Martlet Newsletter of Pembroke College Cambridge Issue 19 Spring 2015

Farewell The Master, Sir Richard Dearlove

Contents 3 Onwards and Upwards 4 In the Company of Antonio Carluccio 5 Nervous Energy: Will the Lights Stay On? 6 Cuckoo Tricks 7 The Politics of Islamic Law 8 ‘This sacred Temple, which we cannot sufficiently admire.’

9 PemWomen@30…

A Celebratory Year 10 A Sunday Afternoon Drive to Mongolia 11 Around the World in 380 Days 12 Creative Writing at Pembroke 13 Gossip 15 Poet’s Corner

Published by Pembroke College Cambridge CB2 1RF Telephone 01223 338100 Email: martlet@pem.cam.ac.uk Editor Alex Houen Gossip Editor Colin Wilcockson Illustrations Martin Rowson © Pembroke College 2015 Photography and illustrations copyright of the owners Design cambridgesesignstudio.org Print Langham Press Ltd

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am writing this year’s piece for the Martlet as I enter the final weeks of my Mastership. It has been a rewarding and satisfying eleven years, and I am honoured to have served as the fifty-third Master of such an extraordinary academic community. The Statutes describe the Master as ‘being in authority over the Fellowship’ – an historical survival which neither the Master nor the Fellows would recognise today. However, in these times of ‘management’ I am drawn to a post that resists job description, with very little routine attached to it, and that is shaped by both the longer-term needs and daily ebb and flow of the life of the community – and where place and people coalesce to create a very special and inspiring ambience. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay the College is to acknowledge that it has provided such a fulfilling alternative to my previous career that I have seldom looked back or even felt the need to do so.

I have loved many of the small things, too. Walking through Pembroke’s empty courtyards in the early morning (usually to collect my newspapers – I prefer newsprint to online) or stepping from an overcrowded Trumpington Street into the still monastic calm of First Court. These simple pleasures are a daily reminder of the power of the place, and the community it holds, to change the lives of its members. The unalloyed message that I have received from the several thousand College Members I have met during my tenure is their gratitude and debt to Pembroke for what it did for them – not just academically but in widening their perspective on the world and preparing them to meet its challenges. Pembroke’s reservoirs of influence, affection and support do run very deep.

What I also admire so much about the College is the confidence it has in its future and the respect for its past.

Looking forwards from a point of advantage carefully built over centuries by previous Fellows and Masters better to see the way ahead, or at least with an improved chance of doing so, describes how I have come to value this subtle blend of new and old. Successful stewardship of the College has drawn on deep roots, many contributors and a strong communal vision of what should come next – and the way ahead is particularly exciting as I write.

I hope that by the time the Martlet goes to print we might have signed the agreement with the University to purchase the lease of the Mill Lane site. It will be the largest expansion of the College since its foundation and will provide extensive new accommodation (mainly to house the larger numbers of graduates coming to Pembroke) and many other facilities that the College lacks – an auditorium, exhibition space, a rare book room, additional offices, improved guest facilities, and so on. Eventually we would hope to connect the Mill Lane complex to the main College site with a tunnel under Trumpington Street so the enlarged site would keep its integrity and

cohesion. The Mastership of my successor, Lord Smith of Finsbury, is going to be dominated by the implementation of this ambitious project and the new Development Campaign that must accompany it. I wish him every success and I know he will enjoy, as I have done, unstinting support from every sector of the extended Pembroke community; and in conclusion I would like to express my own gratitude to the whole community for the way I have felt uplifted and energised by its loyalty and commitment to the College, and by extension to myself personally. It is the aspect of Pembroke that I will probably miss the most.

One other matter of which I would like Martlet readers to take note is Howard Erskine-Hill’s bequest of £100,000 to the College to establish an Art Purchase Fund in his name. Howard loved the visual arts and justly felt that Pembroke, over its long history, had neglected them and that their greater appreciation needed active encouragement. The Fine Arts Committee he started has therefore initiated a collection of ‘works on paper with a literary or academic theme’, and we now have the financial resources to advance the project. The College hopes that members might make donations of appropriate works, or notify us if they are aware of something of possible interest coming up for auction – recent purchases include manuscripts and illustrations of Ted Hughes’s poems, for example. An exciting possibility that I have already explored through our Guggenheim links, is that the Guggenheim Museums might help us mount an exhibition when we are ready to open the Mill Lane site. The relevance of all this, of course, is that College life flows on, and changing Masters for the fifty-fourth time adds another page to the chronicle that is Pembroke. It has been a wonderful eleven years – thank you.

Onwards and Upwards Matthew Mellor, Director of Development

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ometimes, it feels like development work is a Sisyphean struggle: we work hard to achieve something, only to find there is something else that still needs to be attained, a new goal to be reached – the mountain higher, the boulder heavier than we thought.

In 2012, thanks to the marvellous support of Pembroke members and friends, we exceeded what we’d planned to be the great funding achievement of Sir Richard Dearlove’s tenure as Master. Our endowment campaign, Excellence in Perpetuity, raised £29 million against a target of £25 million, and the College’s endowment has grown accordingly. That growth, coupled with the continuing generosity of people like you, means that we feel confident about the future. We have a solid endowment on which to build, but also the resources, we trust, to push that boulder higher up the mountain.

So what can we see at the summit? Something that has been there, shimmering in the distance, for some time now, in fact.

Anyone who has read the Master’s pieces for the Gazette and Martlet, or attended one of the plethora of events that the College organises, will know about our hopes for Mill Lane. A significant development at the end of 2014 saw four interested colleges (Pembroke, St Catharine’s, Queens’ and Darwin) reach an agreement with the University to purchase and develop the site. Such an opportunity for a major

expansion of the architectural bounds of the College has not come about for centuries, and we anticipate it will be centuries before another chance arises. This is a unique moment in Pembroke’s history to transform and enlarge the College’s site to meet current and future demands and objectives. It is nothing less than a second foundation for the College. Put simply, we cannot miss this chance!

It will be expensive (some estimates put the cost at circa £50 million), but it is worth noting that it is the value, not the cost, on which we must focus. The site will provide accommodation, in all likelihood predominantly for postgraduate students, recognising the growth in their number and the increasingly important role they play in the College’s community and in the wider University academic reputation. The site will also give Pembroke the chance to create a research centre that reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the College, while ensuring that the inexorable move of Faculties and Departments north-westwards in the city does not leave a college like Pembroke as a mere hall of residence. There is the potential greatly to improve the teaching environment of the College by the addition of supervision and seminar rooms and an auditorium, while the acquisition of listed buildings directly opposite the current Porter’s Lodge means that the site will truly be an extension of our ambit and not an annexe.

Before he retires as Master, Sir Richard will be doing everything he can to realise our ambition: this will include speaking to benefactors who can make this distant financial target seem achievable while ensuring that the fundamental principles of a solid working relationship with the other colleges and with the University are established. It is in Cambridge’s best interest for the Mill Lane site to be developed the way the four colleges are envisaging, and it is the colleges’ interest for the University to be fully behind and involved in our plans. There is a joint development board leading on the plans, symbolic of the good faith which has governed the opening negotiations to the present day. I hope that Pembroke Members and friends will share in the excitement and confidence here in what this site can do for the College for the long term future.

In pushing that boulder up the hill, I am greatly looking forward to working with Chris Smith as he takes over the reins from Richard Dearlove, but it would be remiss of me not to take this opportunity to thank Richard personally for what he has done for me and my team over the course of his Mastership.

From before he arrived, Richard realised the importance of development and fundraising to the life of the College and he has led from the front, while being unflinchingly supportive of our efforts as a critical friend and as an executive officer.

Pembroke Members and other friends have warmed to him, and he to them, and this has translated into a magnificent period in the College’s history where success on all fronts has been a collective effort, ably guided by Richard’s influence. But it hasn’t just been successful, it has been genuinely interesting to work with him, to meet the people he has brought to the College and to see how the whole community has benefited over these last eleven years.

My team and I wish Richard and Rosalind very well in their retirement and look forward to their continued close interest in the health of the College.

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In the Company of Antonio Carluccio Ambrogio Camozzi-Pistoja

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series for the BBC, we were shooting in a little sea town in Puglia, Southern Italy. There was a small stall against a stone wall, selling fresh fish, and a group of people “queueing”… as Italians do. Waiting for his turn was a little fellow, wet and shivering. He had just been swimming in the sea. I looked at him as he pulled out his skinny bluish arm, with goose bumps; he gave the fisherman some change and then, very seriously, as children can be, he started eating the sea urchin that the vendor had handed him in exchange.

Now, there really are not many other places in the world where boys at that age would crave a sea urchin rather than a lollypop.’

The end of the evening rapidly approached. Seating between the Italian Ambassador and the Master, Carluccio admired the presence of so many intelligent and attractive female students : ‘I hope the time when you will be in charge will soon arrive.’ Carluccio, who was once invited

by Prince Charles to explore for mushrooms at Balmoral, and who managed for many years one of the most popular restaurants in London (The Neal Street), had much to exchange with our Master. But, at that point, the warm noise of the tinkling glasses was too loud for me to hear.

What I did overhear, however, is that Carluccio would like to come back to Pembroke soon – possibly this Autumn to cook for the College his famous mushroom risotto at the next Italian Serata.

Ambrogio Camozzi-Pistoja is the current Keith Sykes Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Pembroke. His research focuses on medieval theories of satire, and he is writing a book entitled Dante the Satirist. He completed his degree in Medieval Philology in Milan, and an MPhil in European Literature and culture at Cambridge. His PhD was funded by the Gates Cambridge.

Credit: Rachel Smith, College Reporter

his year’s ‘Serata Italiana’ (Italian Evening), one of the College events made possible by the generosity of Mr Keith Sykes (1965), took place on 23 February. Pembroke was delighted to have the celebrated Italian chef and restaurateur Antonio Carluccio as the guest of honour. Author of twenty-two books, and presenter of numerous hugely popular television programmes, Mr Carluccio is a living encyclopaedia of food, a free spirit, full of energy and new ideas. His visit was enriched by the presence of the Italian Ambassador to London, Mr Pasquale Terracciano who joined the party for what turned out to be a truly special event.

Following the drinks reception in the Thomas Gray Room, Mr Carluccio, the Ambassador, the Master and Mr Sykes chatted their way to the Old Library in conversation with students, Fellows and the other guests. Carluccio, OBE and Commendatore (the Italian equivalent of a British knighthood), aged 77, was in great form; charming and curious about the collegiate life and Pembroke’s Italian vibe.

Before the reception took place, he and his partner Sabine Stevenson had been taken by Mr Savio Cafagna, the College Butler, for a private tour of Pembroke’s kitchen where the restaurateur met the staff and the head chef for the night, Mr Stuart Little. Carluccio left everyone with a lovely impression and no Hell’s Kitchen shouting.

The menu included Italian parmigiana, British roast beef, and a multinational slice of apple cake with chocolate ice-cream. The wine list was decidedly more topical: Prosecco, Bianco Arneis, Chianti Riserva and Vin Santo.

The final toasts offered the opportunity to thank the Master for his long-standing support of the Italian activities at Pembroke, Mr Keith Sykes for his exceedingly generous contribution to the convivial life of the College, and Mr Carluccio for having helped so many to re-discover the importance of a ‘common table’ for eating together.

There were two memorable anecdotes that Carluccio offered up to capture the spirit of Italy, a country that loves food, and where food is prepared with love. ‘As you all know’, he started, ‘a few weeks ago, one of the greatest Italian statesmen, the President Giorgio Napolitano resigned from office.’ Mr Napolitano, a man of moderation, had indeed helped to steer Italian politics since 2011, spearheading the creation of three consecutive reformminded governments : Mario Monti’s, Enrico Letta’s, and the current one led by Matteo Renzi. In 2013, aged 87, Napolitano reluctantly agreed to stand again for election, to safeguard the country and the continuity of Italian institutions. ‘So, a group of journalists is following him down this narrow Roman street’, Carluccio continued, ‘down from the Quirinale hill to his home, after ten long years of very difficult decisions. And there are some people waiting for him outside the front door, cheering him up and trying to shake his hand. A woman gets a bit closer and asks: ‘President, what are you gonna have for lunch today?’

Mr Carluccio smiled: ‘This was her concern, but also her way of showing affection, understanding. Notwithstanding that, I imagine the former President was wondering about the same thing.’

As Cantuccini biscuits and Vin Santo started to circulate along the tables, Carluccio added his second anecdote: ‘For our most recent tv

From left to right: Mr Keith Sykes, Commendatore Antonio Carluccio, HE Ambassador Pasquale Terraciano, Signora Karen Terracciano, Sir Richard Dearlove, Dr Ambrogio Camozzi-Pistoja.

Nervous Energy: Will the Lights Stay On? Clare Grey on the 2014 William Pitt Seminar

W Clare P. Grey, FRS is the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College.

She received a BA and DPhil (1991) from Oxford University; she was a Professor at Stony Brook University from 1994, returning to the UK in 2009.

She uses solid state NMR spectroscopy and diffraction based methods to understand how materials for energy storage and conversion function.

e live in a society where we take electricity for granted – we rarely question whether electricity will continue to flow from the ever-increasing number of sockets we use to power a vast range of devices.

Prior to coming to Cambridge in 2009, I spent seventeen years in the US and experienced the 2003 Northeastern US Blackout. Yes, the lights went out, but it was much more: the fridge was no longer cold, there was no air conditioning, no kettle, no microwave... Driving up Route 87 with my husband, on our way to a walking break in the mountains in upstate New York, we realised that something was wrong when we stopped at a very dark ‘rest-stop’ for petrol.

Panic set in as I realised that the mobile phone system was down, and that an electricity shutdown would knock out the electrical ‘sump pump’ that prevents my lab from flooding (the lab is below the water table and the pump removes the water that constantly leaks in). It wasn’t even possible to call the lab to check! So, yes, I do worry about powering lights (and the sump pump).

The 9th William Pitt Seminar, which took place last October, was held at a particularly pertinent time. Two of Britain’s power plants had been crippled by fire earlier in the year, and a fire ripped through Didcot power station only two days after the seminar. Coal-fired power plants were being shut down to help meet CO2 reduction targets and it was not clear – to some at least – that the UK had a

Credit: Nigel Luckhurst

The 2014 Pitt Seminar panel. From left to right: Mr Alistair Buchan, Prof. Clare Grey, Lord Oxburgh (Chair), Ms Candida Whitmill, Prof. Roderick Smith.

sufficiently robust supply of electricity to keep it going through the winter. We may have ‘dodged the bullet’ in 2014, but does that mean the UK’s electricity supply is secure enough moving forward?

The Pitt Seminar was chaired by Lord Oxburgh of Liverpool (former Queens’ College President, Head of Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge, and Chief Scientific Advisor to the MOD). Prof. Roderick Smith (Imperial College, and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Transport) reminded us that the digital

age requires as much energy today as was needed to power the whole world in 1985. We forget that ‘cloud computing’ is, in reality, many banks of servers, all over the world, that consume as much electricity as small towns. Candida Whitmill (Managing Director of Penultimate Power) discussed ‘misguided’ European energy policy, arguing the case for small nuclear reactors. My role was to describe how science could save the day, and to highlight the opportunities for younger scientists (and economists, social scientists, etc.) to engage with the problems our society faces in this area. The final presenter was Alistair Buchanan (former CEO of British Energy Regulator Ofgem and current Chairman of the KPMG Power and Utilities Practice), who, using only a pen and a large sheet of paper, outlined the UK’s energy interconnections with Belgium and Ireland and discussed the impact of the closure of UK power plants over the last two years. It was a thought-provoking and sobering evening.

The electricity grid is a complex structure constrained by regulations, multiple companies, and constantly changing demands and supply. The need to increase renewables (wind, solar) has introduced an inherent instability to the grid, and the changeable British weather now affects more than the summer holiday. (Lower average wind speeds resulted in 10% less energy from renewables in 2014 than in 2013, despite additional capacity). I work on battery and supercapacitor technologies. These technologies underpin the portable electronics revolution and help power the digital age – and so have indirectly contributed to the energy ‘problem’. But they have also enriched our lives in many ways and can, in fact, be used to help stabilize the grid by providing back-up power. Their inherently small sizes – in contrast to, for example, a hydroelectric power station – mean that they are used for small jobs: dealing with short periods of high demand (the 6 o’ clock kettle spike) and dramatic changes in wind or solar power. Their role could be increased if we could cut costs and ensure that they last longer (20-40 years for the grid, vs. 2-3 years for laptop batteries).

We need to design chemistries and processes that can be scaled for the grid, building batteries that are no longer cmsized but larger than small office blocks. We need to shut off all the almost inevitable side-reactions that occur between the highly oxidized and reduced species present in the battery, and which result in safety concerns along with the slow degradation of battery performance. My laboratory focuses on designing new methods to ‘watch’ batteries and supercapacitors while they are charged and discharged. We try to determine why some of the best battery materials are effective, and then use this information to improve the functioning of other devices. It is an important field, and one where we need continued investment (no self-interest here of course!).

Any advances made in the laboratory generally take more than seven years to move into the market place. If we are to meet the 2020 EU and UK targets for CO2 emissions, not to mention the 2050 ones, we need both research and development, and we must continue to train the next generation of students in these new areas. I have very much enjoyed my return to the UK and the opportunity to engage with the Cambridge academic community and, I hope, make small contributions to this exploding area of research and technology and its massive social implications.

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Cuckoo Tricks Nick Davies (1970) writes of his recent research

Drawing by James McCallum

idea, cuckoo hosts have more complex markings on their eggs compared to other species with no evolutionary history of cuckoo parasitism. Furthermore, these have the characteristics you’d expect of reliable signatures: individual females have their own distinctive markings and these are consistent across all the eggs they lay. The result is an evolutionary chase, with hosts evolving new signatures to escape cuckoos, and cuckoos, in turn, evolving new forgeries.

Female cuckoos are masters of egg disguise, but they are also very secretive and they lay with astonishing speed; the visit to parasitize a host nest is often just 10 seconds! To test if secrecy and speed was also essential, we placed a stuffed mount of a female cuckoo on a host nest, to simulate a slow cuckoo. The hosts were quick to attack it and their alarm calls attracted neighbours too. Once alerted by the sight of a cuckoo, both the territory owners and their neighbours were much more likely to reject an experimental egg, even one that was a good match of their own. So to deceive her hosts the cuckoo needs to combine her egg mimicry with secret behaviour.

Perhaps the most extraordinary cuckoo trick is the way the cuckoo nestling manipulates the hosts to bring sufficient food. It has an amazingly rapid begging call that sounds like a whole brood of hungry host young. We showed that this is the trick that spurs the hosts to bring more food by experiments, in which we broadcast begging calls through little loud speakers next to the nest. So the hosts are fooled by visual trickery with cuckoo eggs and by vocal trickery with cuckoo chicks.

Our studies reveal that Nature’s arms race leads not only to the evolution of cruelty, in the cuckoo chick’s ejection behaviour, but also beauty, in the form of intricate egg markings. ‘Is Pembroke just for cuckoos?’ asked my youngest daughter, when she was at Primary School. Now, there’s an idea … there’s still plenty more to discover in this fascinating corner of Darwin’s entangled bank.

Reed warbler, the main host species in the fens, feeding a cuckoo nestling.

Over a hundred years ago, egg collectors already knew that there are several races of cuckoo. Each race specialises on one particular host species and it lays a distinctive egg type that tends to match its host’s eggs. We tested if the cuckoo’s egg mimicry was important for deceiving hosts by playing the part of the cuckoo ourselves and putting model eggs into host nests. Our activities were once reported to the local police and we had to explain to a bemused officer that we weren’t collecting eggs; our licence was for putting extra eggs into birds’ nests. Our experiments showed that hosts were much more likely to eject an egg from the nest if it differed from their own eggs in colour and markings.

And the more discriminating the host species, the better was the egg mimicry by its cuckoo race.

Hosts not only evolve egg rejection as a defence, their egg patterns evolve too, with complex markings acting as signatures to enable hosts to better recognise their own eggs. The spots and squiggles on the shell are in effect the way the hosts signify ‘this is my egg’. The cuckoo then has to evolve a forgery: ‘and so is this one’. In support of this

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Cuckoo egg (bottom right) in a reed warbler nest.

Credit: Seb Chandler

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hen I was a Pembroke undergraduate, back in the early 1970s, I often escaped the libraries and laboratories of Cambridge by cycling out to the fens to go bird watching. The advice of one of my supervisors rang in my ears: ‘The days when you could go out with binoculars and notebook and discover something new are long gone.’ I felt sure he was wrong.

One bird intrigued me – the cuckoo, our harbinger of spring and Nature’s most notorious cheat. At each nest she parasitizes, the female cuckoo removes a host egg and replaces it with one of her own. Soon after it hatches, the cuckoo chick ejects the remaining host eggs and any host young out of the nest. Every summer, thousands of small birds will have their eggs and chicks tossed aside by young cuckoos. The host parents are then doomed to raise a cuckoo chick rather than a brood of their own. How, I wondered, do cuckoos get away with it?

In theory there should be an evolutionary arms race in which hosts evolve better defences and cuckoos, in turn, evolve better trickery. But the sight of a little warbler feeding an enormous cuckoo chick makes you wonder whether hosts have any defences at all. My colleagues and I have been studying this question by field experiments.

Every summer still brings fresh surprises.

Nick Davies is Professor of Behavioural Ecology in the Department of Zoology and has been a Fellow of Pembroke since 1979. His book for a general readership, Cuckoo – Cheating by Nature, has just been published by Bloomsbury, with field drawings by James McCallum.

The Politics of Islamic Law New Fellow Iza Hussin writes about her research

I Iza Hussin is Mohamed Noah Fellow at Pembroke College and University Lecturer in Politics and International Studies. Before coming up to Cambridge, she was Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her monograph The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press) is forthcoming in 2015. Her current research traces law’s trajectories across the Indian Ocean.

began to study Islam as an academic subject at Harvard in the days when it was still a niche subject. A few months before the 9/11 attacks, I began doctoral work on Islamic law, and since then the study of Islam and Muslim societies has risen in prominence, in politics as well as in the academy. More recently, the ‘Arab Spring’ and the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ have moved questions of Islamic law and the shari’ah even further towards centre stage.

Despite this, confusion endures about what these terms mean, how Muslims deploy them in politics and statecraft, and why it might matter to get them right – or at least understand why confusion about Islamic law and shari’ah may be part of our politics for some time to come.

The Arabic word ‘shari’ah’ shares a root meaning with the word contemporary Arabic speakers use for ‘street’ – both refer to pathways. Shari’ah is a divinely prescribed path of right conduct through life, only a small part of which fits into the way most states today define law.

Scholars of Islamic legal history often point out that a major defining feature of shari’ah jurisprudence has, until very recently, been its capacity for ambiguity and diversity – its ability to accommodate conflicting opinions on matters of law, its remarkable flexibility and responsiveness to social and political questions.

The major transformative event for the way the shari’ah now functions was the rise of the interventionist, bureaucratic state – a state which wrested control over shari’ah interpretation, adjudication and education from multiple local institutions and began, in the eighteenth century, to attempt to exert a monopoly over Islamic law.

My research locates these transformative moments in British colonial India, Malaya and Egypt, and seeks to understand how Muslims themselves became invested in a radical redefinition of shari’ah as ‘Islamic law’ – from a broad pathway through life, to a narrow state-controlled set of codes pertaining to matters of ritual and family.

The majority of Muslims today only encounter Islamic law in the courts in matters of marriage and divorce, because most states have generally confined it to family law.

Yet this narrow domain of Islamic law continues to carry the symbolic and sacred weight of shari’ah. The tension between these understandings of shari’ah and Islamic law exist for most Muslims and Muslim states, and have for much of Islamic history, and they are powerfully productive of a range of meanings, discourses and strategies for the conduct of Muslim life. The confusion is neither merely a symptom of Western power politics, nor an artefact of the complexity or diversity of Islam – it has been institutionalised in most Muslim states, over the past two centuries. Throughout this history, a dynamic of increasing centralisation and bureaucratisation of the law brought Islam under state control at the same time that it limited Islamic law to the areas of personal status: marriage, divorce, ritual practice, religious endowments.

In India in the 1760s and 1770s, British colonial officials working for the East India Company set into motion a process by which Indian subjects would increasingly be governed by codified versions of what the British understood to be the religious laws of Hindus and Muslims – laws covering marriage, divorce, and ritual observance. In Malaya in the 1870s, British treaties with the Malay sultans preserved Malay religion and custom, understood as Islam, as a domain of sovereignty for the

sultans, offering some elites in Malaya incentives to support circumscribed jurisdiction for Islam in exchange for exclusive control over that jurisdiction. In Egypt in the 1880s, Egyptian Muslim elites who resisted the circumscription of Islam to the area of ‘personal status law’ found themselves excluded from roles in government; it was the Muslim elites who remained in power in Egypt who brought the shari’ah and personal law together in a formula still in use throughout the legal systems of the Arabic-speaking world today – al-ahkam al-shar’iyyah fi al-ahwal al-shakhsiyya – the shari’ah laws of personal status.

Debates about the proper place of the shari’ah today carry the echoes of colonial and national histories in which the power of the state grew out of its takeover and decimation of varied local institutions for Islamic scholarship, education and conflict resolution. Groups that advocate for a ‘return’ to Islamic law – by which the state would enforce a broad codified shar’iah – invoke a nostalgia for a past that has never existed. The view of Islamic law as the repository of tradition and culture in Muslim states is ahistorical, since tradition and culture themselves have been re-defined repeatedly over the past two centuries; it is fundamentally problematic, since it allows the equation of family law and Islamic law to go unquestioned; it is also politically loaded, since the casting of Islamic law as ‘traditional’ has long been part of a logic by which Muslim societies have been seen as backward in comparison to the West, and therefore in need of intervention.

Seeking out the politics in Islamic law allows contradiction and ambiguity to play a critical role in our analysis of Muslim institutions, states and individuals.

Islamic scholars in eighteenth-century India, law reformers in nineteenth-century Egypt, and Muslim women activists whom I met in Malaysia recently, all operated in the spaces between shari’ah and Islamic law. Out of contradiction and ambiguity, they made new opportunities for making claims, building identities, pressing advantage. The conditions of doubt, of tension and of deep historical investment that characterise much Muslim debate and struggle today represent not a series of failures to be overcome, but legacies in need of continued evaluation.

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‘This sacred Temple, which we cannot sufficiently admire.’

Jayne Ringrose writes of the consecration of Pembroke’s Chapel 350 years ago

W

hen Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely, consecrated Pembroke College Chapel on St Matthews’ Day, 21 September 1665, to the worship of Almighty God, it was the culmination of his gift to the College (a gift made to fulfil a vow he had undertaken during his eighteen years’ imprisonment in the Tower of London), and it had cost £3,658. 1s. 5d to build.1 The Book of Common Prayer, however, contained no rite of consecration: the sixteenthcentury Church of England had other concerns. Matthew himself, recently translated to the See of Ely, had in 1639 been perturbed to find that a chapel in Childerley, Cambridgeshire, had been consecrated by an earlier Bishop of Ely, Martin Heton, simply by saying a service and ‘having a sermon’.2

Photos credit: Jayne Ringrose

The Act of Consecration for Pembroke’s Chapel.

That would not do for Matthew, who together with his brother Christopher (Senior) – father of the famous architect – had in 1620 attended Bishop Lancelot Andrewes3 as chaplains at the consecration of the Jesus Chapel and Cemetery at St Mary extra Southampton, known as the Peartree Chapel. Andrewes’ rite became, and remains, normative for consecrations;4 comparison with the order used at the consecration of Peterhouse Chapel by Bishop Francis White (Heton’s successor in 1632 when Wren was Master there) shows remarkable similarities, albeit with a greater use of Latin.5 Few documents survive from the actual consecration of Pembroke Chapel, but the four items which remain fit neatly with the Peartree and Peterhouse liturgies, and make it extremely probable that the same orders were used.

The event would have taken all day, beginning probably at eight in the morning, when Matthew would have stood before the Chapel door while the Fellows requested him to consecrate the chapel, and after a flowery Latin preamble (from which I’ve gleaned the title of this article), the Master, Robert Mapletoft, handed him the key. Once inside, a rite strongly derived from the consecration of Solomon’s Temple began, with Psalm 24 (‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates’) and the beginning of Psalm 122 (‘I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord’) recited solemnly in Latin, with beautiful prayers by Andrewes that had been used originally at in English at Peartree, and then in Latin at the Peterhouse consecration. Wren worked his way around the Chapel, laying his hand, with prayer, on the various furnishings, the places of daily prayer and preaching, and of the Eucharist. Kneeling before the Holy Table he asked that the Chapel be separated from all secular and profane uses.

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Then came Morning Prayer and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper (both in English) with sermon. Following more prayers, Matthew, seated in his chair and attended by his second son, Archdeacon Thomas Wren, and the Master, read out the elaborately calligraphic legal Act which still survives. After the Blessing, proceedings were adjourned for dinner; the Chapel account book records the cost of this as £10. 7s. 6d – five times what it had cost the previous year.

The Vice-Chancellor, Several Masters of Colleges, the Heads of the University as well as the Dean and Canons of Ely attended. The Masters of Pembroke, Peterhouse, and Jesus Colleges were to be appointed Trustees of the Manor of Hardwick (the Chapel endowment), and each given a key to the still-surviving Hardwick Chest.

That afternoon, the burial areas were consecrated (again after the formal request to the Bishop from the Fellows) and the legal instrument of consecration was read. The specific areas were: the antechapel, for the burial of Fellows; the Cell under what was then the east end of the Chapel, for Matthew’s own burial and that of select persons (described at the time as a ‘dormitory’ for his Lordship); and the area under the cloister for scholars who died while in residence.

In consecrating the cloister for the burial of students, Matthew Wren would probably not have thought beyond attacks of plague or consumption. We know that the Cloister was occasionally used for burials during the next two centuries. In 1924, however, it was chosen as the obvious place to record the names of the members of the College, many of them undergraduates, who fell in the First World War. Sacred space indeed.

The Hardwick Chest.

1 So the Chapel account book College MS. 5.ii.365. The figure often given, £5,000, is not supported.

2 William Laud, Works (Oxford 1847-60) 5.ii, 361. I thank Peter Meadows for this reference.

3 Lancelot Andrewes, Master of Pembroke 1589-1605; successively Bishop of Chichester, Ely and Winchester.

4 The text, which repays detailed study, is available at http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp//Andrewes_Consecration_ Church.htm 5 Peterhouse Archives, Vetus Registrum pp 480-90. I thank Dr Roger Lovatt, Fellow Archivist of Peterhouse for his ready assistance in allowing me to photograph part of the Register.

Jayne Ringrose is honorary archivist of the College and a Bye-Fellow. She retired as deputy Keeper of Manuscripts at the University Library in 2012.

Building Pembroke Chapel: Wren, Pearce and Scott by A.V. Grimstone (1952) can be purchased from the Finance Office, Pembroke College, Cambridge, CB2 1RF. Please send your name, address and payment. The cost is £15 plus £2 p&p in the UK; £5 p&p for the rest of Europe; elsewhere, p&p £5 (surface mail) or £10 (airmail). Payment may be made by cheque in £s sterling payable to ‘Pembroke College’; or by bank transfer to ‘Pembroke College’, Barclays Bank, Sort Code 20-17-19, Account Number 30712620 (please include a reference to ‘Chapel Book’). For payment by credit/debit card contact the College by ’phone on 01223 338126.

PemWomen@30… A Celebratory Year Loraine Gelsthorpe

Loraine Gelsthorpe became a Fellow in 1994, and has been Tutor for Graduate Affairs since 2003. She is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Deputy Director of the Institute of Criminology, as well as being Director of the Cambridge ESRC Doctoral Training Centre across the social sciences, and national President of the British Society of Criminology.

Credit: Rachel Smith, College Recorder

Lent term ‘Skirts and Ties’ installation in Hall.

Another event, titled ‘How many long mirrors?’, demonstrated perfectly how much the College has changed over the past thirty years. This talk and discussion was chaired by Lady Adrian and involved reflections from emeritus fellows Ian Fleming (1956) and John Waldram (1956) describing something of the internecine arguments in College for and against admitting women, and Brian Watchorn, newly-appointed Dean and Chaplain at the time, reflecting on the early days of women students in College.

Pembroke rather dragged its feet over the issue (compared to other colleges which had already gone mixed) to consider what were deemed to be practical obstacles to admitting women – such as changes needed to the bathrooms, and the question of how many long mirrors would be needed, as well as other matters, both large and small.

Credit: Rachel Smith, College Recorder

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arrived in Pembroke in 1994, so this thirtieth anniversary year of women being matriculated as students is the twentieth anniversary for me, and a year in which I find myself as the most senior female Fellow.

There were very few women Fellows at the point of my arrival, but there was certainly much celebration of women as members of the College. One of the first College events I attended was devoted to the Lady Foundress, with all women in the College (students, staff, and fellows) being invited to drink a toast to her. It was clearly much more than that, though, for it was largely an occasion to celebrate being women in the College.

In the academic year of 2014-15 there has been much cause to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary within the whole College, which is why a dedicated team of people representing Fellows, students and staff have created a programme of events under the heading of ‘PemWomen@30’.

This programme was set up to reflect on the issues and debates which led up to the decision to admit women as students, but also to examine what has happened during the past thirty years, and to consider where Pembroke might like to be with regard to diversity after another thirty years.

We started the year with a Michaelmas term Hall installation of ‘Skirts and Ties’ across the gallery, representing the gender balance of Pembroke students during the year 1984-1985 (forty ties and four skirts), and signature dishes from Pembroke’s five women chefs for a special BA Dinner in aid of Camfed, a Cambridge-based charity which helps girls from sub-Saharan Africa receive an education. (Camfed is one of the two charities being supported during the year by members of the College, the other being Cambridge Rape Crisis Centre.)

The ‘How many long mirrors?’ panel in the Old Library.

Pembroke’s contribution to Cambridge’s annual Festival of Ideas this year was PemWomen@30 related, as the College hosted a panel discussion on the question ‘Is menstruation healthy?’, which challenged cultural reluctance to talk about the issue as well as misconceptions that menstruation is somehow ‘unhealthy’.

Lent term activities included another week of the Hall installation, but with an equal number of skirts and ties on the gallery line to representing the more-or-less equal proportion of men and women students within the College now. Having reflected backwards during the Michaelmas term, another talk and discussion revolved around ‘where we stand now’. This event, convened by Pembroke Fellow Dr Lauren Kassell, focused on the College’s educational mission, with perspectives from various Fellows, undergraduates, graduates, and staff.

The 1347 Committee chose to mark the thirtieth anniversary by holding a ‘Life Beyond Pembroke’ event specifically aimed at celebrating College alumnae who have gone on to achieve distinction in their chosen careers. In another celebratory event during Lent, the Graduate Parlour chose to tackle the question of why it is that women are often less heard than men in the workplace. Seven guest panelists – with very different and exciting careers spanning science, business, law, human resources, and academia – discussed their perspectives on the topic, and offered tips for effective communication in the work place. A charity auction, organized by the Graduate Parlour’s charity representative, raised over £2,000 for Camfed, with prizes including a holiday house in France for a week, bottles of fine wine, a rubix-cube lesson, a home-baked celebratory cake, and bicycle maintenance!

The Easter term is bringing another creative installation in Hall, this time looking to the future, when the Hall’s portraits will no doubt include some women of note in addition to the Foundress! There will be another panel talk focusing on future diversity in the College and beyond, and a special anniversary dinner in June.

Through all of the events I’ve mentioned, PemWomen@30 is aimed at fostering reflection and celebration as well as forward thinking and action. For a full account of the activities see: www.pem.cam.ac.uk/pemwomenat30/. That website includes details of the students, staff and Fellows who have been involved in organizing the events – it’s truly been a team effort, though special thanks must go to Monica Wirz (2009) for her inspiration and organisational skills. Do please send to the ‘Stories and Memories’ section of the website your own reflections on what it was like in College in the early days of women being admitted as students.

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A Sunday Afternoon Drive to Mongolia Rob Sanders (2011)

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ast summer, a friend and I decided we wanted to make use of what could be our last long summer together and do something we’d never have the chance to do again. After several nights debating the various options, we settled on The Mongol Rally. The team would consist of myself, Jamie Robson (2011), Rory Scott (2011) and Matt Walton (Trinity Hall). The Mongol Rally is a charity rally in which teams of up to four people drive from London to Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia. The car’s engine must be no larger than 1.2L and cost no more than £800. It is not a race; it is an adventure.

From left to right: Matt, Rob, and Jamie in front of ‘The Door to Hell’ crater in Turkmenistan.

Our preparations started badly when the first car we bought broke down on the way home from the seller. Our second purchase proved better: a ten-year-old Daihatsu Terios from a Newcastle car auction. We bolted a roof box on top, threw on a set of van tyres and bought copious amounts of duct tape. We were ready to set off!

We sped through Europe in six days, and after a long overnight drive into Turkey we spent our first rest day in Istanbul. Unfortunately, this is where Rory left us to go and study in America. After a trip to a traditional Turkish bath, we said our goodbyes and the three of us remaining teammembers started a forty-hour straight drive to the Iranian border.

Iran is an incredibly beautiful country but the drivers … they are insane. There is no lane discipline and no indication of when a car is going to swerve in front of you, which all makes for interesting traffic jams. In the five days we were in the country we spent over 25 hours stuck in traffic, constantly having to stay alert to avoid crashing into the locals – a rather exhausting experience. Traffic aside, Iran was, in my opinion, the best country we visited and the generosity of the locals was humbling, particularly in comparison to common media portrayals of Iran. At one point we found ourselves out of petrol without any local currency, and instead of being turned away by petrol stations we were given free fuel, biscuits and orange juice – an act I would be surprised to witness in England.

After Iran we ventured into Turkmenistan, the only Police State on our trip, and stopped off at ‘The Door to Hell’, a gas crater that has been burning since 1971. This spectacular burning landmark is located pretty much in the middle of a desert, which proved a slight issue for our little old Terios.

The atrocious quality of road all around slowed us so much we exited the country only hours before our visas expired, nearly landing us a couple of nights in jail.

We never intended to spend much time in Uzbekistan, but a trip north to see the Aral Sea left us short on petrol. To our

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surprise we found that petrol was a scarce resource, something you would never have expected of a country neighbouring Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. This left us going around the streets knocking on locals’ doors in search of petrol. Uzbekistan is a large country, requiring several tanks to cross, so this became a regular occurrence.

A few days later we arrived in Kyrgyzstan, the first country since Iran to have roads that wouldn’t shatter your spine or shear your rear axle if you went too fast. Kyrgyzstan also held the trip record for the number of times we were pulled over by the police: we averaged six stops a day, with demands for bribes ranging from $10-$200. Here we met up with other ralliers and decided to convoy the last part of the trip together. Next stop Kazakhstan.

We were all running a little behind schedule at this point so pushed on towards the Russian border as quickly as possible. Naturally, this was when major mechanical issues arose. Halfway through Kazakhstan, we cracked both rear coil springs in two places. Spare parts are not an option in Kazakhstan, so with the help a local mechanic we cut an old pair of springs from an ex-army Soviet truck and jammed them in, jacking the rear of our now beloved car up an extra six inches and making the ride very solid. Ready to head off in the morning, we set up camp in a field at the side of the road with the ralliers who had been kind enough to wait; it turned out to be the early stages of a naturally occurring marijuana field.

Once in Russia, we returned to tarmacked roads – a luxury I will never again take for granted! – and made good time in reaching the Mongolian border. The finish line seemed so close, but the next seven days were some of the toughest of the trip. Mongolians travel on horseback a lot of the time, so roads are not a necessity; what they call roads we would probably call fields in England. Crossing Mongolia, including large parts of the Gobi Desert, was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. It felt like I was on a week-long 4x4 driving experience. Inevitably this led to car troubles, which made it that much more rewarding to hit the country’s only piece of tarmac only fifty miles from Ulaanbaatar.

So there we have it: 42 days and 10,000 miles after setting off from London, with over £3,000 raised for charity, we made it to the finish line. All that was left was to say goodbye to the incredible car that had carried us all that way.

Rob Sanders is a fourth-year Natural Scientist specialising in chemistry.

At the finish line in Ulaanbaatar.

Around the World in 380 Days Peter Dudfield (2007), a.k.a. Peter Pedals

O Peter Dudfield has been with Pembroke College for seven years, studying mathematics as an undergrad and now studying for a PhD in Fluid Dynamics. His research focuses on two main areas: interseasonal heat storage, and carbon capture and storage.

This involves building mathematical models, numerical modelling, and laboratory experiments. His love for cycling began seven years ago in France, and he has never looked back (accept when turning right).

(Above) Berthoud Pass, Rockies, USA. (Above right) on the road through the Nullarbor Desert.

n the 1st September 2013 I set off from Cambridge on a round-the-world cycle trip. Three hundred and eighty days later I returned to Pembroke having cycled over 30,000km and raised more than £17,000 for the British Red Cross’s International Disaster Fund. I missed the College’s friendly community a lot whilst I was away and I’m now happily settled back in.

My aim was to pack light and cycle a lot! I had a tent and five panniers carrying a change of clothes, a waterproof coat, some tools, a camping stove and lots of food and water. My bike and load weighed about 45 kg, which is fairly low for a touring cyclist, but when I had a day of uphill riding my legs really felt it.

The bike held up really well. I cleaned it about once a week and I’m sure that helped to prolong its life; I even cycle the bike around Cambridge at the moment. I had a few punctures here and there, new chain and gears in Australia and several new brake pads, but nothing serious – which is amazing for the distance the bike went.

To navigate I used maps. I preferred using maps to GPS as a map can never run out of battery. For the whole year I had a vague route in mind, but I would only really thoroughly plan at most a week’s ride at a time. I did take some flights [insert your own pedalo joke here], where I had to pack the bike up complete into a cardboard box.

I was mostly camping, apart from in a few countries where camping was logistically difficult. Sometimes people invited me into their house, which was very kind of them, and in Thailand I was allowed to camp in Buddhist temples which was really special. In Azerbaijan, a family with no running water invited me and a friend in, and they even

gave up their bed for us. This really showed me you don’t have to be rich to be kind.

Every day I was aiming for four meals a day, including loads of carbohydrates. This was sometimes difficult to achieve, and I ended up eating a lot of spaghetti. If I was able to pick fresh fruit it would make my day. I also ate chicken head soup (which was not very nice) and Kangaroo tail, which was distinctly gristly.

The first two weeks were pretty tough; I was fairly fit but not super fit. The Turkish Black Sea hills tested me and reduced me to tears at one point. I even had to push my bike up a few of them, but on the way down I did hit my top speed of 71 kms per hour. The only two times I fell off my bike in the whole year were in Turkey. I found this quite hard to deal with, but I fell off the other day in Cambridge so I guess it just happens sometimes...

I prefer cycling in hot rather than cold, but sometimes it was too hot. In Greece and Spain it was regularly above

40 degrees centigrade, which meant I had to drink more than 10 litres of water a day just to keep going. In contrast, it turns out that in the mountains around Beijing in November it gets pretty cold. I distinctly remember brushing ice off the tent in the morning. On another occasion, near Chicago, a storm brought down a tree on the tent, but luckily with my travel sewing kit I could repair it.

The hardest part of my cycle ride was crossing the Nullarbor Desert in Australia. This amounted to twelve days’ ride across 1,250 kms of virtually nothing. I couldn’t carry all my water, so I had to rely on passing caravans to give me some. These caravans became known as my ‘water angels’. It would often be two or three hours where I wouldn’t see any cars, which was a little scary. Eleven days of head wind also tested me mentally, particularly down a 90-mile straight road.

Throughout the year I came across many different animals, some friendly ones, some not so friendly. I will never forget being chased by wild dogs, cycling over poisonous snakes, and accidently picking up dangerous spiders. The odd charging bull also raised my heart rate.

I learnt lots of things when cycling this year. First, 99.9% of people are nice, they want to be friendly and help you out. Having a smile on your face opens doors for you which can improve your day massively. After surviving on the basics, the small things can mean a great deal; I’m still not quite over how easy it is to make a cup of tea now. Also my first formal at Pembroke when I returned was outstanding! The lonely times have taught me to really appreciate my friends and family, too.

Return to Pembroke.

I would like to thank everyone who helped me out last year. I truly wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own.

I would still massively recommend cycle touring to anyone, literally anyone, so please email me if you have any questions: peterpedals2013@hotmail.com

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Creative Writing at Pembroke Harry Cochrane (2012)

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y his own admission (no pun intended), Pembroke’s Senior Tutor Mark Wormald spent much of his time as a student in The Other Place exhorting, cajoling, even threatening people into the Magdalen Poetry Society.

It was either such a success, or such was Mark’s devotion to poetry, that when he ascended here to Pembroke in 1994 he brought the idea with him. True, the ‘Bring Your Own Bottle’ rule had not made for consistently judicious meetings: if one wanted one’s poem to be reviewed with any thoughtfulness or tact one had to hope that it appeared early on the billing, before everyone’s critical faculties went and the evening hastened to a boozy dégringolade. This and other lessons learned, Mark set about transplanting the seed of Magdalen’s Poetry Society to pastures new.

There were a number of reasons why I applied to Pembroke, and if they were not clear reasons at the time, they became in hindsight very good ones: its jumbled prettiness, its academic stature, its venerability, its relative anonymity on the tourist trail, the nooks and crannies you would never hope to find in the vast, impersonal expanses of Trinity and John’s. I had a good friend also (successfully) applying. But in the complex business of college choice, one of my prime motives was the existence of the Pembroke Poetry Society. I cannot recall the precise wording of the exact sentence on the college webpage, but there it was: a dedicated society for the poets or, in my case, the poetasters of Pembroke College. At my interview, I innocently enquired about the group. ‘Yes’, Mark said, ‘It meets in this room.’

‘This room’ was J4, Mark’s office, in which ten months later about forty people crushed themselves for the first ‘Pemsoc’ meeting of Michaelmas 2012. The room is a shrine to Pembroke’s most famous bardic alumnus, Ted Hughes. In fact, the whole room seemed to be a metonymy for Hughes; you sensed his spirit bound up in the fishing rods and the plaster cast of a defeated pike, hanging so menacingly on the walls. Posters of Hughes’ poems, underscored with line drawings of various pikes, confirmed it: Mark’s love of poetry was matched only by his love of fishing. The majority of those present, however, shared only the former, and so, under the auspices of the aptly-named Phoebe Power, the society resumed for another academic year.

It continues to this day, in the rudest of health, following much the same format as it did back then. Leadership of the group is always hereditary, never democratic, and having taken on the leadership myself I can confirm that the issue of succession has so far never provoked challenge or revolution! As long as I give due notice of the forthcoming meeting – and I haven’t always – there are no

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complaints filed. People send their poems; I collate them, anthologise them, and print out about twenty-three copies of them all, and at 7:30pm or thereabouts we sit down with wine and sugary foodstuffs (now funded centrally by the College) to discuss the writings. Conversation meanders and deviates but, hopefully, and given time, finds its way back to the poem on the page.

I hope this doesn’t all sound like a belletristic jolly, because it isn’t: everything is done in earnest pursuit of wellthought, honest feedback, as much as we can squeeze into twenty minutes on each poem. One of the best things about Pemsoc is its heterogeneity: about half of our members belong to other colleges, and not all of them are arts students. And, believe me, we have some really good poets, and have said farewell to many others. When Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, joined us for an evening in March 2013, he told me during the interval that he was staggered by the quality of the poetry.

He said that he was tempted to quote two lines from Laura Blomvall’s ‘Sonnet X’ in his next sermon: ‘Let us cling to the Cross, to Christ’s suffering, / Let us breathe pure air through his collapsed lungs.’

Pembroke also has other creative writing ventures in addition to its Poetry Society. Hannah Kaner (2011), who is to have her first novel published in the next few months, founded the ‘Writers’ Bloc’, Pemsoc’s sister society in prose.

Last summer Pembroke hosted the ‘Creative Writing in Cambridge’ programme, at which Pemsoc stalwart Michael Brown honed the poems that would make up his book The Exhibit (he has since gone on to co-found the Baudelaire Society at Gonville and Caius, an outfit with more of an emphasis on spontaneous composition). And National Academy of Writing masterclasses with illustrious authors take place in Pembroke every term – so often, in fact, that one almost becomes used to having one’s efforts scrutinised by the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro.

I will end with a word on Clive James (1939), who undoubtedly qualifies for a list of great literary Valencians which includes Edmund Spenser, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart and, of course, Ted Hughes. Clive launched his new collection of poems, Sentenced to Life, in Pembroke on Friday 17th April. I wonder what he thinks of the fact that Cambridge’s English Literature Tripos doesn’t make provision for students to submit creative writing to as part of their degree. In a way, it matters not a jot: creative writing, and creativity in general, is at least thriving in Pembroke!

Harry Cochrane is a third-year reading English. He hails from north Northumberland, a place that would inspire anyone to write poetry, and one that he loves about as much as he loves Pembroke. He takes any opportunity to encourage people to read Dante, including this one.