The University of Cambridge, having suffered hard times before and after the First World War, prospered during the post-war years up until the 1970s. During that period British governments were generous to universities, and respected their independence. As this attitude dissolved, Cambridge obtained a surge in non-government research grants and contracts, and became world famous. But it is now suffering from a financial squeeze caused by repeated cuts in government funding, accompanied by a tide of political intervention. Using the university's financial records and other statistics, Robert Neild traces the nature and scale of these changes and how they have affected the character of the university, plotting its financial history from 1850 to the present day.

Throughout history, public corruption has been endemic. Exceptionally, it was significantly suppressed in modern times in northwestern Europe. Why did that happen? Why did politicians introduce measures that acted against their own interests? And are the political forces that then induced reform alive in today's world? Neild explores these highly topical questions by looking at the suppression of corruption in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in four countries - France, Germany, Britain and the USA; at the evolution of independent judiciaries; at developments in the twentieth century, including a reminder of how widely corruption was used as a weapon in the Cold War, particularly in the Third World. Finally, and most devastatingly, he analyses the rise and decline in standards of public life in Britain in the twentieth century.