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Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, this is Weekend Book Review. 🎙️✨ Today I am buzzing to open a door that was always there yet rarely noticed, a door with a brass plate that reads Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History by Simon Goldhill. 📚🌈
I love a book that starts quiet, then grows louder, then refuses to leave. This one does exactly that. It lifts letters from drawers, diaries from shadows, and memories from rooms where the curtains were always half closed. It shows us a network of queer Fellows at Cambridge University who lived, loved, fought, wrote, argued, taught, and changed British culture in ways that echo like bells. Think E. M. Forster. Think M. R. James. Think Rupert Brooke. Think Alan Turing. Names you know, stories you might not. 🔍🕯️
Published on 16 January 2025 by Cambridge University Press, this book catches history mid-sentence and lets it finish. It maps a community that was tolerant and acerbic, tender and iron-willed, a community that turned fear into wit, and loneliness into kinship. In these pages, King’s College becomes a living organism, a giddy place, a shelter where words like homosexuality and queerness shift shape and meaning, where generations pass the torch, where the archive feels warm to the touch. 🏰🔥
And the author guiding us through this? Simon David Goldhill FBA, the voice you wish you had in your seminar and the mind you wish you had at your dinner table. He is Professor of Greek literature and culture, fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King’s College, Cambridge, past Director of CRASSH, a lecturer and broadcaster whose work has crossed continents and languages. When he reads a line, the meter breathes. When he reads a life, the room listens. 🦉✨
So here we are, with a book that is not just an alternative history of male homosexuality in Britain, but an alternative history of Cambridge itself. If the archive still whispers, what else might it be waiting to tell us next❓
Thank you, Simon Goldhill, and thank you, Cambridge University Press. 🙏💙
If you enjoyed this, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and to our YouTube channel Weekend Researcher. 🎧▶️ We are also available on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast. ⭐📱
Reference
Goldhill, S. (2025). Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009528078
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