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.

Reviews

EARLY PRAISE FOR HISTORY IN THE HOUSE:

'In his highly informed new study, Richard Davenport-Hines illuminatingly explores the links between privilege and patronage with wit and authority, bringing contradictory characters such as the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Arthur Hassall to life in fascinating detail'

Observer

'Davenport-Hines does not know how to write a drab word, and his lovingly drawn portraits are charming, captivating and...compelling'

TLS

'Engaging...an exemplary work in the genre... the author delivers the goods on nearly every page'

Spectator

'Among the great qualities of his marvellous book is that it manages, with infinite subtlety and tremendous charity, to capture both the grandiosity and the melancholy of the place... The book opens with a pitch-perfect historical introduction. This is followed by a collection of biographical essays about eight of the men (and they were, until recently, all men) who taught modern history at Christ Church. By almost any measure, they were an impressive lot....History in the House...is replete with reflections on lives devoted to the study of the past. The whole book, indeed, is in part a meditation on the nature of history: how it should be taught and why it should be studied'

Literary Review

Book Information
ISBN 9780008285722
Author Richard Davenport-Hines
Format Hardback
Page Count 432
Imprint William Collins
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Weight(grams) 680g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 159mm * 40mm