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The sojourn of England's finest living poet was not long, but long enough. Geoffrey Hill grimly muttered his discomfort to me as we walked over one of the Cam's most camcorded bridges. "I have to leave this place. I can't stand its violence and materialism."

Violence? Materialism? To the earnest Orientals training their lenses on the tree-fringed river and noble abutting stonework, Cambridge must seem one of the world's great hermetic retreats, where combat is only intellectually fierce, and the spirit lords it over the rest of the world's worldly business. There is an architecture of such superficial monasticism, accessorised (as they say) by the gowns and boaters and other heritage habits. Day-trippers will not hear the cries of the scholar dragged from his cycle in some street after closing time and given a pasting by local oafs (Hill's own son received a fractured skull thus); nor are they to know that colleges are run by men in suits, not gowns. Yet the truth is that Hill's emigration to Boston was a move to a far calmer and more studious place.

Tourists who brief themselves with Graham Chainey's account of Cambridge as a literary conduit will soon enough realise that disenchantment with the city and the university is, on balance, the proper response, and a time-honoured one too. Geoffrey Hill's own treatment here was paradigmatic of the Cambridge attitude to literary lions generally, and that is a refusal to lionise at all. Reduced in academic status and salary, assigned the usual teaching duties, Hill was unlikely to stay long. Towards the end of his time at Cambridge, a doctor told him his heart might stop dead at the dinner table, and he imagined the chilly response of his fellow dons to this eventuality. "Hill's failed to stand for grace. Fine him a bottle." The essential heartlessness of institutional Cambridge was well summarised in this morbid reflection.

Pickled in a steady flow of alcohol, switching its masks alternately from scholastic haven to Vanity Fair, the university redeems itself by sheer hard work. Kingsley Amis somewhere records that his two-year stint of teaching in the Cambridge supervising regime was the most exhausting work in his life. So far, Cambridge has refused to admit "creative writing" as an academic exercise, though whether this stems from principle is doubtful (after management studies, anything is possible); and so it remains the case that literary pups are reared at Cambridge despite the university, not because of it. Chainey's history of this process, with its comprehensive accumulation of illustrious names, will probably be regarded as a good case for maintaining this attitude of disregard.

"Illustrious names", for Chainey's purposes, means those figures for whom one can gather the sort of anecdotal debris that makes up a Cambridge reputation or cult. Hence the generous and florid profiles of Byron and Coleridge, of Rupert Brooke and the Bloomsberries. It is a charming accumulation of such legends, which one is initially tempted to hail as comprehensive too. But "comprehensive" only if one shares Chainey's narrow view of what counts as "literary". For one of the lessons of postmodernism is that most academic activity is based on story telling, persuasion, and word weaving. And, even if one refuses to accept that tenet, there are figures in the Cambridge record who would certainly feel insulted that they gained only passing mention in a "literary history". The literary influence of Frazer's The Golden Bough, for instance, is arguably greater than Housman's poems or Strachey's essays. Traditional canonical expectations oblige Chainey to tell us as much as he can about Thomas Babington Macaulay, but nothing about George Macaulay Trevelyan. In this respect it seems a book as much aimed at the camcorder's Cambridge as the teddy-bear bazaars along King's Parade. And it will raise a deep groan from Geoffrey Hill that he simply appears in the list of "resident writers not necessarily connected with the university" along with fellow luminaries Clive James and Jeffrey Archer.

Nigel Spivey is editor, Cambridge Review.