Genius loci

Passing through Grantchester the other day, I caught this glimpse of the Mill House.

Apart from the fact that it was another beautiful Autumn day, what’s the significance of this? Answer: it’s the house in which Bertrand Russell lived when writing (with A.N. Whitehead) Principia Mathematica. There’s a wonderful photograph somewhere of Russell delivering the manuscript of the book to Cambridge University Press — in a wheelbarrow. The tragedy is that nowadays most people associate Grantchester not with mathematics but with the deservedly minor poet, Rupert Brooke (Stands the village clock at ten to three/ And is there honey still for tea?), or — worse — the unspeakable ‘novelist’, Jeffrey Archer, who has a house in the village, though mercifully is rarely seen there nowadays.