History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft

by Richard Davenport-Hines

History in the House pulls back the curtains on Christ Church, Oxford and reveals its great and lasting historical significance.

This is an exciting new historiographical study from the much-acclaimed historian Richard Davenport-Hines. It shows the evolution of historical ideas, purposes and methods in a clerisy that has enjoyed conspicuous influence in England for six centuries. There was growing recognition, in Tudor England, that the study of history especially improved the minds, enlarged the imaginations and broadened the vicarious experience of princes, noblemen and administrators. History showed, by precept and example, good government and bad, virtue and vice in rulers, and the reasons for the success or failure of states.

History in the House looks at the temperaments, ideas, imagination, prejudices, intentions and influence of a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern history at Christ Frederick York Powell, Arthur Hassall, Keith Feiling, J. C. Masterman, Roy Harrod, Patrick Gordon Walker, and Hugh Trevor-Roper (a Victorian radical, a staunch legitimist of the protestant settlement, a conservative, a Whig, a Keynesian, a socialist, and a contrarian).

Genres: Nonfiction, History

434 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 20, 2024

About the author

AKA R.P.T. Davenport-Hines

Reviews

[Kidlitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the wonkiest of academic goings on, in the Anglophilic, privileged and entitled settings possible, look no further than this interesting read about dons messing about, mostly intellectually. Fans of Golden Age mysteries might enjoy if they want to really grasp what Sayers was so obsessed by.