In his second, revised edition of a history of Balliol College, John Jones — vice-master, chemist and archivist — shows the same sure touch that distinguished his earlier work as he carries the college’s story beyond the second world war. He writes with easy authority and the book rattles along to its final genuflection to the college’s benefactors, beginning of course with the Balliols of Barnard Castle and above all Dervorguil- la, the lioness of Galloway.
The foreword to this edition by the university’s recent vice-chancellor and Balliol’s quondam Master, Colin Lucas, draws attention to Balliol’s ‘recurrent capacity for being out of tune with the prevailing orthodoxy of the times’. A previous Master, Anthony Kenny, who like Lucas went on to become Warden of Rhodes House, noted in his foreword to the earlier volume that Balliol’s geography underlined this point.
