I have just received an advance copy of David Cannadine’s festschrift – Institutions, Individuals and Modern British History, edited by Jonathan Parry and published by The Boydell Press.

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I have only had time so far to read Parry’s introductory account of Cannadine’s remarkable career. Parry implies that Cannadine modelled himself on the career of Jack Plumb, the worldly Master of Christ’s who must have helped to get him elected to a fellowship at Christ’s when he was appointed in 1977 to an Assistant Lectureship in British eighteenth-century history, an interesting appointment for someone whose PhD was on late nineteenth-century landownership. Possibly. But at that stage of Cannadine’s career, he seemed more influenced, as Parry also makes clear, by the work of Lawrence Stone at Princeton and H.J. Dyos at Leicester; and, as it happens, I think of Linda Colley, Cannadine’s wife, as more obviously a product of the Plumb school having done her PhD under him on the early eighteenth-century Tory party.

Anyway, the book is a rich feast for anyone who is interested, as I am, in the relationship between individuals and institutions and it includes essays on two other Cambridge historians – Noel Annan, author of a study of the intellectual aristocracy, and Owen Chadwick, who is always said to have turned down every bishopric offered him.

But, it’s not cheap.