History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft (Hardback) - Richard Davenport-Hines

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

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 Church: 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).

About the Author

Richard Davenport-Hines won the Wolfson Prize for History for his first book, Dudley Docker, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature. He is the author of several books, including biographies of W.H. Auden and Marcel Proust. His most recent books include An English Affair, Titanic Lives, and Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. He writes for the Guardian, Oldie, Spectator, The Times, Wall Street Journal, and Times Literary Supplement. He is an adviser to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and lives in London.