Elisabeth Leedham-Green reflects on reality in the famous university town of Cambridge. This is a sharp place, best encountered when, as surprisingly often, the sun is shining and there is frost in the air. Then the stone sparkles and seems to float a few inches above the gleaming grass — a veritable Camelot, but a Camelot with a ‘lazy wind’ that blasts round the corners of the streets and courts but straight through mere human flesh bringing bitter intimations of mortality and of the sheer inconveniences of existence. Perhaps it is this coexistence of fairyland and the howling tundra, this constant interplay of romance and of brutal reality, that has so notably furnished Cambridge with scientists of all kinds and, above all with poets and with mathematicians.