St John's College Cambridge: A History - Hardcover

A sumptuous production. [...] The erudition is cumulatively overwhelming, the entertainment liberally distributed. HISTORY

[A] sumptuously produced book-remarkably good value for its length. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW

A fine example of the vogue for large-scale histories of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
There can be no doubt that Johnians...will find the college's new history diverting reading. [...] Handsomely produced by Boydell, based on exhaustive archival research, elegantly written and replete with the kind of biographical anecdote that gives spice to any institutional history. TLS

Within a generation of its foundation on the site of a decayed hospital at the behest of Lady Margaret Beaufort, England's queen mother, the College of St John the Evangelist had established itself as one of the kingdom's foremost educational establishments: in the words of one notable contemporary, as 'an university within it selfe' indeed. And in the period thereafter - the years between 1511 and 1989, the period covered by the present volume - St John's has continued to provide its fair share of Prime Ministers and other politicians, bishops, Nobel laureates, artists, writers, and sporting heroes, as well as to irrigate the rich loam of the nation's history in all sorts of other unexpected ways and places.
However, not until the organisation of the College's archives and records in the present generation has it been possible to describe in sufficient detail the full story of that progress and adequately to trace the College's development and achievements in recent centuries. The present history, the first since the early 1700s to provide a systematic and informed account of the subject, seeks to make good this historical defect. It is published as part of the celebration of the quincentenary of the College's foundation.