Real Cambridge

Cambridge: the right brain of Oxbridge, the composite capital city of Clever. For eight centuries, this quiet English city has been one half of history's longest-running academic arms-race, stockpiling Nobel Prizes like other places store nuclear warheads. For the title of the most intelligent place on Planet Earth, only the two Ivy League newcomers, Harvard and Yale, come close. This flat East Anglian fenland community is where Wittgenstein split hairs and where Rutherford split the atom; where Newton sought God through science, and where Darwin found that science was God; where Watson and Crick discovered the DNA that shapes our bodies, and where generations of students push those bodies to their limits. This is where the world went to college: Tennyson, Cromwell, Donne, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Stephen Hawking, most of Monty Python and nearly all of Pink Floyd. It's also the place that gave us Association Football, Dolly the Sheep, the Night Climbers, and Katrina and the Waves. And the place where the idealistic local council put hundreds of free bicycles in the streets for the citizens to share. And they were all nicked in a week. Cambridge is the city of punts, Pimms and privilege, but Davies also finds a stranger Cambridge that will be a surprise to many of its citizens--even the really clever ones.