Burckhardt in Cambridge
Housed inside a small brown box shelved alongside other Library manuscripts is an assortment of 15 slim notebooks formerly belonging to the scholar and explorer […]
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The Japanese collections at Cambridge University Library and Gunsho ruiju
The modern Japanese collections at the University Library started after World War II, with funding granted following the Government’s Scarbrough Report of 1947 (‘Report of […]
Continue reading »The original Miss Austen: celebrating the bicentenary of ‘Sense and sensibility’
This month marks the 200-year anniversary of Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and sensibility, which was published in October 1811 as an anonymous work, ‘by […]
Continue reading »An Ottoman cosmography
The brown leather binding looks unremarkable enough, but within the Library’s rare books collection there is a volume, which once opened up, demonstrates a key […]
Continue reading »A challenge to amateur spies: the Hugh Childers papers
The Royal Commonwealth Society department is completing a detailed online description of the papers of the politician Hugh Childers (1827–1896). One of the most fascinating items […]
Continue reading »William Bedwell: the tribulations of an Arabist
William Bedwell was an Arabic scholar and mathematician born in Great Hallingbury, Essex, in 1563. He is sometimes known as the father of Arabic studies […]
Continue reading »Historic Hong Kong
Six spectacular photographic panoramas of Hong Kong, taken c. 1900, were recently painstakingly conserved by Nicholas Burnett and colleagues at Museum Conservation Services at Duxford, […]
Continue reading »‘A sapper’s letters to his mother’ II
Hugh Pearson distinguished himself as Director of Surveys in Sudan between 1905 and 1922, mapping huge tracts of little known desert, forest, marsh and waterways. […]
Continue reading »‘A sapper’s letters to his mother’
This is the title of an important collection of letters recently acquired by the Royal Commonwealth Society department, RCMS 356. The author was the Royal […]
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