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 quite well cushioned by investment income.
