Edward Dent was a prolific correspondent and hundreds of letters remain, many in the Rowe Library at Kings College, Cambridge, bearing witness that what he wrote was treasured by the recipients. Clive Carey was no exception: during a friendship that began in Cambridge in 1901 when he was an organ scholar at Clare and Dent a newly elected Fellow of King's and lasted till Dent's death in 1957, Carey kept every letter he received, more than four hundred in all. Using some of these letters as a framework, Carey's nephew has compiled an informal biography of Edward Dent. The book is illustrated throughout with pictures taken for the most part from personal sources. Production pictures, costume designs and sets will be of particular interest to the theatre and opera historian, while the period flavour of the book in general will appeal to anyone with interest in or nostalgia for an era that ended with the fifties.
Mansfield Forbes (known as 'Manny' to several generations of Cambridge colleagues and pupils) was the very young historian-Fellow of Clare College who just after the First World War had more to do with the founding of the Cambridge English Faculty and its intellectual basis than anyone else. He was also one of the great Cambridge eccentrics (but a charming one). Innocent, original, unselfconscious and without egoism, his virtues produced his oddities. As a child, Hugh Carey knew him as 'Uncle Manny'. This affectionate portrait, illustrated with photographs, reconstructs Forbes' life, and explores his other interests, which included Scottish domestic architecture and modern art. Mr Carey also uncovers alternative aspects of that vanished but still influential Cambridge that somehow united in intellectual activity Keynes, the Bloomsbury group, the great physicists and biologists, Richards, Leavis and their colleagues: some high-minded, some high-spirited, others open-hearted - and many
