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One man’s quest to create a library of everything, 500 years before Google Books was conceived, foreshadowed the challenges of ‘big data’ and our reliance on search algorithms to make sense of it all.

Rustic figurines of a resigned-looking Virgin clutching her child may have no obvious literary or artistic merit to us today. But understanding what they meant to the spiritual lives of their owners can offer a glimpse of the human hopes and fears that people have, for centuries, invested in inanimate objects.

Things structure our lives. They enrich us, embellish us and express our hopes and fears. Here, to introduce a month-long focus on research on material culture, four academics from different disciplines explain why understanding how we interact with our material world can reveal unparalleled insights into what it is to be human.

reimagines the real forests that our greatest playwright evoked in his works.  ̽��ֱ��final book of renowned scholar, Anne Barton, it explores the changeable and sometimes sinister presence of the forest in literature and culture.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is partnering with BBC Radio to promote the BBC National Short Story Award, the BBC Young Writers’ Award and the BBC Student Critics’ Award in a three year collaboration starting in 2018.

̽��ֱ��discovery this summer of an impressive rock-cut tomb on a mountainside in Prosilio, near ancient Orchomenos in central Greece, will shed new light on Mycenaean funerary practices.

At a symposium next month (15 September 2017) academics, artists and ornithologists will share their responses to the work of 19th-century poet John Clare, whose patient and accurate observations of birds in field and hedgerow continue to astonish and inspire.

A political leader who seeks to make his nation “great again” and a time when ‘post-truth’ rhetoric appears to support political ambitions. Not Trump’s America, but Rome 2,000 years ago.

Polish language, literature and culture will be a permanent feature of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s research and teaching following the signing, today, of an agreement with the ̽��ֱ�� of Warsaw.

Researchers have designed a super stretchy, strong and sustainable material that mimics the qualities of spider silk, and is ‘spun’ from a material that is 98% water.