Cambridge is currently second only to Harvard in the league of universities in the world, with half of Harvard's endowment and twice as high a teaching commitment for the staff, this is a considerable achievement. In terms of its total history, of course, it is unrivalled. It has won more Nobel prizes than all other British universities combined, more than France, more than any other university in the world. And many of its greatest thinkers, Bacon, Newton, Darwin, Hawking, amongst them, were in a time before, or in subjects for which there is no Nobel prize. Its great poets, from Spenser, Donne and Milton, to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson, constitute three quarters