The chapters in this book are based on a series of lectures given to the Cambridge University International Summer School in July 1993. The Summer School was attended by about 350 people from over thirty countries, studying a variety of subjects. Summer School students spend a month in Cambridge and can appreciate for themselves the visible splendours of its college and university buildings. Its intellectual achievements are rather less visible. As director of the Summer School, I invited the contributors to this series to explain the importance of what had been achieved in each of their subjects, for a completely non-specialised audience.

Many of the resulting studies concentrate on individual figures. This is not intended as an endorsement of history through the Great Names of the Past, but only to provide some focus of interest for subjects that may be alarmingly abstract to grasp. And the subjects here are almost absurdly varied: radioastronomy, economics, anthropology, molecular biology, philosophy, palaeontology, and many more. There is an equal variety in the fame of the characters whose work is discussed: from Keynes and Wittgenstein at one end of the scale to James Stuart and John Neville Figgis at the other.

The series goes back only about 150 years, partly because of a need to draw the line somewhere, and partly because this has been a period when whole careers – rather than only short years as students – were spent in Cambridge by some of its most well-known products.