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

Christ Church is the largest and wealthiest of the colleges that make up Oxford University, and it is known in the local patois as “the House.” It was founded in the 1520s by Cardinal Wolsey to inculcate “statecraft” in those who would go on to take leading roles in the public life of the kingdom. Richard Davenport-Hines’s book focuses on several of the men who taught History in the college in the nineteenth and, especially, the twentieth centuries, figures whom he admires not as teachers of a specialist subject, but as moulders of a future governing elite. After briefer discussions of some of their predecessors, he concentrates on six of the college’s History tutors in the twentieth century: Sir Keith Feiling, Sir John Masterman, Sir Roy Harrod, Patrick Gordon Walker (Baron Gordon-Walker), Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), and Robert Blake (Lord Blake). The ubiquity of titles in this group is testament to their carefully cultivated establishment connections: Christ Church was long regarded as the most socially exclusive of the Oxford colleges, with a penchant for admitting the scions of aristocrats and other old Etonians as undergraduates, and a general sense of being on the inside of the inside pervades this book. …