In his 2009 Presidential Address to the British Society for the History of Science, Jeff Hughes told a story about the Athenaeum and the Royal Society of London. A certain fellow of the latter objected to the proposal (made in the wake of the 1951 Festival of Britain) to move the society's offices from Burlington House to a new purpose-built national centre for science on the South Bank. His reason for objecting was that the society would be too far away from the Athenaeum! While this story is not included in this excellent new history of the Athenaeum, it nevertheless neatly captures the special place that the club has in English cultural and scientific life.

London clubs have not received as much historical attention as they deserve, though most have their own published histories of varying degrees of quality. Although written by an insider on the occasion of the forthcoming bicentenary of the Athenaeum's founding in 2024 (giving it something of a celebratory air), nevertheless it is very different from most internal club histories. Michael Wheeler, sometime professor of English literature at Lancaster University, a prominent specialist in Victorian literature, most notably John Ruskin, is a staunch Athenian, as he would doubtless put it. But he does not avoid uncomfortable events in the club's history or members who later became an embarrassment, such as Kim Philby or Jimmy Savile. Drawing heavily on the Athenaeum's archives and arranged mostly chronologically, Wheeler in a coherent and seamless way tells the story of the club as an administrative entity, as a building and as a place of sociability. It is an exemplar of institutional history. Furthermore, Yale has produced a handsome volume with a generous number of well-reproduced images, very few typos and an excellent index, all making it good value.

Clubs and societies were a standard feature of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sociability in London and Paris. The political clubs could exert enormous influence and power – think of the Jacobins in Paris, or, in London, Brooks’ (Whig) or White's (Tory). What is striking from Wheeler's account is the deliberate effort made by the Athenaeum's founders to establish an explicitly non-party-political club, but one whose membership included men of science (women did not become members until 2002, an episode recounted at some length), artists, writers, clergymen and so on, covering the entire spectrum of political opinion. When politicians were elected it was for their other activities, for example Benjamin Disraeli (Conservative) and Thomas Babington Macaulay (Whig).

Such political diversity can be traced to two of the prime movers of the club, John Wilson Croker MP and Humphry Davy, who held dissimilar political views. Croker was First Secretary of the Admiralty and high Tory, while the political connections of Davy, president of the Royal Society of London, were eclectic, but generally after a radical(ish) youth, he associated more with Whigs. Davy was especially keen to establish such an elite club so that those non-scientific men who aspired to Royal Society of London fellowship could instead join something equally prestigious and so make the society more scientific. In this he was not especially successful, but his involvement ensured the presence of scientific members of the Athenaeum from then until today. (Although in a curious case of inverted anti-elitism, Wheeler notes that a recent chief scientific adviser does not include his membership in his Who's Who entry.)

The Athenaeum in the twentieth century occupied a special place in the English imagination and continues to do so. Wheeler nods to the frequency with which Charles Snow referred to the Athenæum in his Strangers and Brothers novel sequence by so entitling one of his chapters. And, of course, he mentions Yes (Prime) Minister. In both Snow and the television programmes, the Athenaeum is depicted as a place where critical meetings were held more or less in privacy in this exclusive confidential space; the Chatham House rule appears transparent by comparison. Wheeler provides examples of such meetings which doubtless formed the basis for such legends and general perceptions of the club.

The club remains on the site in Waterloo Place that it has occupied continuously since 1830. This is a long time in comparison to where the Royal Society of London has been located. After the failure of the South Bank plan, the society eventually moved in 1967 to the old Prussian and then German embassy in Carlton House Terrace (Joachim von Ribbentrop's dog is buried in the garden). Whether this building was selected because it is less than a thirty-second walk from the Athenaeum is not revealed in this book, but much else is.