Sir Harry Godwin looks back over sixty years of life at Clare College, the University of Cambridge and its very distinguished school of Botany. He came to Clare in 1919 as an undergraduate, became an early research student and was a Fellow from 1925. A botanist, he was virtual founder of the science of Quaternary Research in England, using the technique of pollen analysis to show the age of plant remains and their distribution, especially in the Fens and peat bogs of Eastern England. His History of the British Flora (CUP 1956) is a classic. Sir Harry contemplates his threefold life, as a deeply loyal college man, as a Cambridge researcher and professor, as a member of the wider scientific world. He remembers the long-past Cambridge of small college societies, still in touch with the Victorian world, and tells of its characters and conventions. He explains his own scientific work in terms that any reader can understand. The whole story is a microcosm of Cambridge and English life: the time and the world of Snow's The Masters, but made more real and a great deal more genial.

Sir Harry Godwin has written a companion volume to his widely acclaimed Fenland: its ancient past and uncertain future. He follows the same historical approach that made Fenland so interesting. Vast rain-fed peat bogs still cover the landscape of northern and western Britain, their ecology, vegetation and flora unfamiliar to most of our population. Yet, through the millennia since last Ice Age, they have accumulated ever-deepening acidic peat, whose plant remains are a precious archive of the events of the past. Upon investigation, the reconstructed bog vegetation gave clues to former climatic history, pollen analysis provided a chronological scale dependent upon changes in upland forest composition and archaeological objects from the Mesolithic to the Roman period were recovered by peat-diggers from observed horizons in the bogs. The Archives of Peat Bogs will be of great interest to a wide readership comprising both amateur and professional biologists, geologists, geographers, archaeologists, naturalists and antiquarians.

The features so characteristic of the Fenland, its flatness, its flooding, its vast stretches of silt land and black peat, its drainage channels, meres, buried forests, abundant water fowl and aquatic plants, its special crops, all relate to the special conditions in which the Fenland was formed and ultimately was taken over by man. This is the story, by one of the active participants, of how the researches of natural scientists, biologists, geologists, geographers, historians and archaeologists, over the last fifty years have, by active co-operation and the use of modern techniques, reconstructed Fenland history through the last 10,000 years and have provided fresh understanding both of its ancient past and its uncertain future. It is the only such synthesis for either specialist or general reader in a hundred years and it is written in simple non-technical language and fully illustrated both by photographs and drawings.