A new book celebrating Cambridge University’s 800th anniversary which features contributions from famous alumni including Sebastian Faulks, AS Byatt and Sir Peter Hall will go on sale this weekend.

The University of Cambridge - an 800th Anniversary Portrait is a new, comprehensive overview of the University as it reaches the 800 milestone, covering everything from its small beginnings through to its plans for the future. It will be available from Saturday, November 1.

The book traces the University's growth and development from the Middle Ages to its modern status as one of the world's finest academic institutions.

It touches not just on the academic side of University life but the roles of Colleges and Schools, libraries and museums and student societies and clubs as former students recall their time in the Footlights, Union, sports clubs, and their day-to-day undergraduate experience.

There are also pen portraits of some of the great teachers and thinkers to have emerged from the University, from Marlowe and Milton through to Watson and Hawking. Academic contributors, drawn from the sharpest minds in Cambridge today, review past achievements and look to the future in the sciences, arts and humanities.

Experts assess and interpret both the medieval buildings of central Cambridge and the University's spectacular modern architecture.

Throughout, the book features the first-hand recollections of men and women who passed through it as undergraduate and research students. Among the hundreds of contributors there are some familiar names, including Sebastian Faulks, Alain de Botton, AS Byatt, Anita Desai, John Simpson, Jeremy Paxman, Simon Hoggart, Peter Hall, Nicholas Hytner, John Shrapnel, Sue Perkins, Clare Balding, Christopher Hogwood and John Eliot Gardiner.

In his foreword, the Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, writes: "This book, with its anthology format, tries to catch the essence and character of modern Cambridge. I believe that in doing that, as well as recording the academic achievements and research successes, it reflects the hopes and tensions, the concerns and anxieties, of a vital and energetic organism."