Old Member Publications

Wade Allison (Physics, 1963)

A major impact of physics on civilisation has been that it enables us to see inside things – from everyday objects, to the Earth, to our own bodies. Which aspects of physics are primarily responsible for this revolution? How do they work and how are they used to provide the information and images? Are the dangers that surround applications of this physics understood? Or are the public misinformed? This book is written to answer these questions. Its coverage is broad but it is also quite demanding in places, for it avoids the easy way of asking the reader to take statements on trust. For more information click here.

Cambridge Jones (PPE, 1985)

Cambridge Jones (who also took the majority of the photographs in our own 'Christ Church, Oxford: A Portrait of The House') was commissioned to spend a year photographing 100 stars of stage and screen who trained at RADA. Everyone from Alan Rickman to Joan Collins and Tom Courtenay to Mike Leigh. It took him from the Austrian mountains to Malibu Beach and from EastEnders to ER. The foreword is by Lord Attenborough and interviews by Miranda Sawyer. Available from Amazon and all good book shops but if you buy it from RADA direct or his own website you will be donating 100% of the price to The Centenary Bursary he created to fund one student a year through RADA. Visit www.cambridgejones.com or the RADA website here.

Stephen Clarke (Modern Languages, 1978)

In the third "Merde" novel, Englishman Paul West leaves his beloved Paris and accepts a job that involves him touring the USA in a Mini, putting on a series of events to promote Britain as a tourist destination. He is thus faced with the task of getting Americans to do the Highland Fling and recite Shakespeare, while managing the mood swings of his temperamental French girlfriend. For more info click here.

Should students of Tudor political thought be interested in a feisty Swiss republican who hardly set foot outside his home canton of Zurich, and a Florentine aristocrat who spent just five years of his career in England?  This book presents the case for including two leading lights of the Schola Tigurina—Heinrich Bullinger and Peter Martyr Vermigli—among the chief architects of the protestant religious and political settlement constructed under Edward VI and consolidated under Elizabeth I.  Through study of selected texts of their political theology, this book explores crucial intellectual links between England and Zurich which came to exert a significant influence on the institutions of the Tudor church and commonwealth. Read More (www.brill.nl)

John Miller (Modern Languages, 1958)

I wrote this book for three reasons. First, out of a gratitude for the wonderful four years I enjoyed as District Officer in Swaziland in the 1960s. Second, to help counter the generally negative perception of our colonial past. And third, and most important, to try to raise Swaziland's profile. Swaziland is currently ravaged by drought, probably caused by global warming and it has the highest HIV/AIDs level in the world (42%). It desperately needs inward investment. As Deputy Prime Minister Albert Shabangu said last year, "If something is not done, the nation will cease to exist". I hope the book shows the Swazis are a delight and deserve to prosper. For more information please click here.

Nicholas Rankin (English, 1969)

In the Spectator, M.R.D. Foot described Churchill’s Wizards as ‘an anecdotal appendage’ to fine works by two other Old Members of the House, Sir Michael Howard’s Strategic Deception and Thaddeus Holt’s The Deceivers. But Churchill’s Wizards is not merely a bolt-on: it roots British military camouflage, deception and black propaganda back in the Great War. ‘This enthralling, bizarrely comic history’, wrote Boyd Tonkin in The Independent, ‘collects the rackety secret careers of figures from TE Lawrence (a “fake sheikh” if ever there was one) to Dudley Clarke – the man who invented a fictitious “Special Air Service” to frighten the Nazis before any real SAS existed.’ Churchill’s Wizards ‘is a book of marvellous yarns’, said Michael Bywater in the Daily Telegraph, ‘which will appeal to a far wider readership than the sombre consumers of standard military history…[I]t's hard to think of anyone with a taste for human ingenuity being anything other than enchanted and, if British, sneakily proud.’ Get the best-selling paperback here.