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Trinity College , on Trinity Street (daily 10am-5pm; GBP1; tel 01223/338400), is the largest of the Cambridge colleges and to ram home the point it also has the largest courtyard. It comes as little surprise then that its list of famous alumni is longer than any other college: literary greats, including Dryden, Byron, Tennyson and Vladimir Nabokov; the Cambridge spies Blunt, Burgess and Philby; two prime ministers, Balfour and Baldwin; William Thackeray, Isaac Newton, Lord Rutherford, Vaughan Williams, Pandit Nehru, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, not to mention a trio of (much less talented) royals, Edward VII, George VI and Prince Charles. A statue of Henry VIII, who founded the college in 1546, sits in majesty over Trinity's Great Gate , his sceptre replaced with a chair leg by a student wit. Beyond lies the vast asymmetrical expanse of Great Court , which displays a fine range of Tudor buildings, the oldest of which is the fifteenth-century clock tower - the annual race against its midnight chimes is now common currency thanks to the film Chariots of Fire . The centrepiece of the court is the delicate fountain, in which, legend has it, Lord Byron used to bathe naked with his pet bear - the college forbade students from keeping dogs. To get through to Nevile's Court - where Newton first calculated the speed of sound - you must pass through "the screens", a passage separating the Hall from the kitchens, a common feature of Oxbridge colleges. The west end of Nevile's Court is enclosed by the university's most famous building after King's College Chapel, the Wren Library (term time Mon-Fri noon-2pm, Sat 10.30am-12.30pm; rest of year Mon-Fri noon-2pm; free). Viewed from the outside, it's impossible to appreciate the scale of the interior thanks to Wren's clever device of concealing the internal floor level. In contrast to many modern libraries, natural light pours into the white stuccoed interior, which contrasts wonderfully with the dark lime-wood bookcases, also Wren-designed and housing numerous valuable manuscripts including Milton's Lycidas , Wittgenstein's journals and A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh .
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