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

432 pages, Paperback

Published August 19, 2025

About the author

Richard Peter Treadwell Davenport-Hines (21 June 1953) is a British historian and literary biographer, and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Davenport-Hines was a leading signatory to a letter in The Guardian urging Britain to remain in the European Union during the membership referendum of 2016

Reviews

[Xiu Lim]

I've only read up to and including p. 120, and it's also been a while since I last picked up this book, so these impressions should be taken with a grain of salt. I felt like the first ninety or so pages focused too much on intellectual lineages and could have been far more concise, focusing only on the key figures instrumental to the founding of Christ Church and the Modern History course.

The book makes explicit quite early on that these professors viewed history as a guidebook for contemporary policymakers: "Most ancient historians, according to Arnaldo Momigliano, saw their task as giving instruction in the management of change" (p. 5). Although I think it's dubious to regard this as the primary purpose of history (Prof. Carnes' eyebrow is definitely raised), if this was indeed how these dons understood their vocation, I wish Davenport Hines had spent more time exploring how they drew lessons from specific historical episodes and taught them to the students who later entered statecraft.

Describing the approach of FH Bradley: "All past events are interpreted by historians from their present standpoint, and with their own inflexions...Historians with any depth or originality in their work allow their own ego history to shape their selection and analysis of evidence" p. 7
-- Likewise, I want to read more about how the life experiences of these dons shaped the way they conducted their scholarship.

[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.