God’s house with many mansions

Institutional history is a tricky genre, so prone to over-reverence, so likely to be tedious to anyone but those attached to the institution described. So it was superficially brave of a commercial press to commission a quincentenary history of a Cambridge college: brave, that is, until one discovers that its authors include Quentin Skinner, the late Roy Porter, David Canna- dine and Simon Schama amongst others, all of them alumni of the Jack Plumb school of history, which was based in Christ’s during Plumb’s long postwar reign there as history tutor and which became the forcing house for an engaged,...