Advent Calendar of Christmas Cards from Trinity College Archives

The ephemeral nature of Christmas cards makes them quite rare in the Trinity College archives.  Here are 24 from across the collections, some traditional, some quirky, some personal:   Rose Macaulay designed Christmas card MACR.8.99 Christmas card sent by Wittgenstein WITT.402.6 E.M. Forster's Christmas Card TRER.3.25 Frederick Anthony White's Christmas Card Add.ms.a.84.16  Rose Macaulay designed …

“It doesn’t matter what you think of me. I know you love me-” – Erskine Childers’ goodbye

“It doesn’t matter what you think of me, I know you love me.” So wrote Erskine Childers to his friend Ivor Lloyd-Jones on 24th November 1922, hours or even minutes before he faced a firing squad. Robert Erskine Childers was executed at Beggars Bush Barracks, Dublin, in the recently formed Irish Free State. Before his …

Last Poems after a Century

  Nicolas Bell considers a new edition of A. E. Housman’s second poetry collection 2022 is a year of literary centenaries: on 2 February 1922 Joyce’s Ulysses first went on sale at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and the October issue of the magazine Criterion included another modernist masterpiece, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. …

Wittgenstein and Photography: New Insights

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fellowship admission photograph, 1929. F.A.II.7[2] One of the most famous images of Ludwig Wittgenstein is the photograph which he sent to Trinity College as a requirement for his election to a scholarship in 1929. A new exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna allows us to see this photograph in a new light. The …

James Bond at Trinity

On 5 February 1964 Ian Fleming and James Bond met and dined together for the first and last time. Fourteen years earlier Fleming had been at Goldeneye, his home in Jamaica, preparing for his wedding, when he began writing a spy novel to settle his nerves. His hero, he decided, ought to have a straightforward …

Andrew Marvell at 400

The poet and patriot Andrew Marvell was born on 31 March 1621 in the East Riding of Yorkshire. He attended the Grammar School in Hull, where his father had been appointed Master of the Charterhouse. Two of his teachers in Hull were graduates of Trinity College Cambridge, but he would later comment rather sardonically that …

Questions on Criticism: Arthur Balfour’s Romanes Lecture on literary criticism and beauty (1909)

Among the material recently acquired by the College is a collection of documents relating to Trinity alumnus and former Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour (Add.MS.a.616). Following his entry into Parliament in 1874, much of Balfour’s early career was focused on Ireland, where he remained staunchly against Irish home rule and oversaw the redistribution of land …

Alchemy at Trinity: Newton and the Library

Guest blog post by Dr Anke Timmermann, former Munby Fellow (2013-14) and author of an annotated catalogue of alchemical texts and illustrations in Cambridge. Anke is a historian of science, bibliographer, writer, and antiquarian bookseller. It is a fact perhaps not as well-known as it ought to be that Trinity College is inextricably connected with …

J. J. Thomson Remembered

Joseph John Thomson, the Master of Trinity College between 1918 and 1940, was a Nobel Laureate in Physics who first distinguished himself as Professor of Experimental Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory. Thomson was born on 18 December 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. His father, Joseph James, ran an antiquarian bookshop that had been in the …

Remembering Ramanujan

Sunday 26th April 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of world-renowned mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was born in the city of Erode, in India in 1887. Ramanujan’s extraordinary aptitude for mathematics led to him gaining and then losing a scholarship to the prestigious Government Arts College in Kumbakonam - he focused so much …