Isaiah Berlin, at a dinner at Corpus Christi College to celebrate his eightieth birthday, compared Oxford's colleges to various countries. Christ Church was like France (grand and aristocratic). New College was like England (solid, unimaginative, and run by Wykemists). Balliol was like the United States (brash and multiracial). Corpus Christi was Denmark (small, orderly, and universally admired). All Souls was like the Vatican: it had no subjects and claimed a close relationship with another world. In the present volume, following essays by Adrian Wooldridge and Simon Green on All Souls' prize fellowships, there are essays about All Souls and the wider world to which the title of this book refers: on Sir John Simon (Stephen Cretney), on R. H. Brand (Green), on W. K. Hancock (Jim Davidson), on the “Round Table” (Michael Howard), on Germany (John Clarke), two essays on India (Sarvepalli Gopal), on appeasement (Green again), an essay on Leo Amery and one on the Suez crisis (both by Roger Lewis), and on G. M. Young (Mordaunt Crook). These are all stylish essays, packed with the detailed research one would expect of these distinguished authors. This volume succeeds a previous collection of essays edited by Green and Horden, All Souls Under the Ancien Régime: Politics Learning and the Arts, c. 1600–1850 (Oxford, 2007), and it will be followed by Simon Green's The Exceptional College: All Souls, 1850–1950 (Oxford, forthcoming).

As it moved into the twentieth century, All Souls was very much the creature of William Anson, its first lay warden and, indeed, its second founder. He converted it from an intellectual backwater into a powerful center for the study of law and history. It became “an exceptional college, a curious amalgam of university professors and Prize Fellows” (3). At a time in which university reformers urged other colleges to convert their fellowships into offices for college and university teaching, All Souls preserved its, and these fellowships became prize fellowships truly. Prize fellowships, allocated on the basis of open competition rather than kinship or locality, transformed the university from a seminary into an institution for secular learning. In the whole of Oxford (excepting All Souls) between 1878 and 1914, there were 128 prize fellowship elections, and fully half of those holding them took up academic posts in the university. By itself All Souls elected 63 prize fellows in the same period. Of these only 10 became scholars, devoting their lives to research. Seventeen became lawyers, 12 became politicians or public servants, 6 became writers or journalists, and 5 became bankers. This is not to minimize their contributions to learning. When Sir Frederick Pollock came to Oxford as Corpus professor, he paid tribute to Anson and All Souls as “a centre of legal thought and work fitted to produce results that shall be academical in the best sense” (Pollock, Oxford Lectures and Other Discourses [1890], 40, 96). Anson had distinguished himself as the author of the Principles of English Law of Contract (1879) and the Law and Custom of the Constitution (1886). A. V. Dicey composed what the old Dictionary of National Biography called “the esprit des lois of our times” in his Lectures on the Relationship Between Law and Public Opinion (1905). These men, latterly, were followed by Oman, Pollard, Coupland, and Radcliffe-Brown.

Most did not slip into what Curzon condescendingly called that “state of resentful coma which is dignified by the universities with the name of research” (38). The wider world into which All Souls' prize fellows reached was not the heavenly city to which Berlin referred in his speech, some vita comtempilva; it was a worldly world of the vita activa. Anson himself not only was warden and vice-chancellor but also had a very public career as Liberal Unionist MP (1899–1914), serving briefly as a cabinet minister and as one of the founders of the British Academy. Green, as well as the other authors in other ways, acquits All Souls of charges that it was a hotbed of conspiracies, a government of Mallardry associated with a cloistered manipulative establishment. Green is impatient with the very concept of an establishment, which he regards as a weak and inadequate way of explaining the relationship between leadership and political behavior. Green also provides a welcome discussion of the appeasement controversy, showing how the very idea of appeasement was highly unstable, having several quite different meanings in the 1930s.

Woodridge and Green shed light on the inner life of All Souls, what Charles Oman called the “splendid spirit of College patriotism” (48). The other authors shed light on the afterlife of prize fellows as they ventured into the wider world. What one wishes to know more of is the actual interrelationship and dynamics of these two sets of experiences. Or were they two distinct sets of experiences? Perhaps they were the same experiences refracted through two prisms. What made All Souls, as a distinct institution, sufficiently robust so that it could contain (and restrain) those special spirits it found in prize fellows? What made it sufficiently agile so that it could admit people of talent and merit? What is the relationship between All Souls' robustness and agility, what Hensley Henson called its “atmosphere of vivid and varied culture” (64)? One hopes that Green's forthcoming The Exceptional College will tell us.