Sex, although usually highly significant to most people, does not normally feature prominently in biographical accounts of historians. However, Michael Bentley, who has written extensively on historiography, in this study of the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979), structures much of the text around Butterfield's passionate, extramarital and ultimately failed love affair with Joy Marc (1905–1995) undertaken in the second half of the 1930s.

Butterfield was born in Brontë country (and Bentley makes much of his Yorkshire Methodist background) and educated at Keighley Trade and Grammar school. The word ‘trade’ is significant as it meant that Butterfield knew more about science than perhaps most of the provincial grammar-school boys who made their way to the University of Cambridge in the interwar years. He entered Peterhouse as an undergraduate history student in 1919 and remained there for the rest of his life, being elected a fellow on graduation in 1923. In 1929 he married the daughter of a Methodist minister and two years later published the book that made his reputation, still referred to today, The Whig Interpretation of History. Then there was no further book until 1940.

It would appear that in 1934 Butterfield and Marc commenced their affair, the existence of which Butterfield sought to conceal both at the time (and Bentley tells a highly entertaining story of how they managed their correspondence) and later. Indeed it is only with Bentley's location of Butterfield's side of the correspondence (he destroyed her letters) that their affair has come to light. Bentley uses it to account not only for Butterfield's lack of productivity during the 1930s, but also, more importantly, for the way in which he had, as someone who had previously been strongly Methodist (and working as lay preacher until the affair), to fundamentally recast his world view. Not for Butterfield the usual Christian response of saying one thing and doing another, but seeking to bring sex and relationships into his theology. There were limits, however. Marc wanted him to divorce his wife to marry her and she even went to Egypt (where she eventually married a colonial official) to pressurize him. Rightly or wrongly, Butterfield ruled out divorce because of his intense ambition (he was later master of Peterhouse and vice-chancellor of Cambridge University); interestingly he was highly supportive of his protégé Rupert Hall (1920–2009), who did divorce his first wife, following a remarkably similar affair, in the late 1950s.

In the 1940s Butterfield began publishing and thinking about the historical and theological significance of the war. Unlike many he refused to accept the notion that individuals such as Hitler or Churchill were entirely and solely responsible for the catastrophic events that were, it seemed to him, destroying European culture at that time – a view that was not popular with many of his contemporaries. Possibly the last major historian to believe in Providence, Butterfield summed up his theology and world view in Christianity and History (1949), which concluded with the line, ‘Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted’.

The year 1949 was particularly productive for Butterfield, for he also published George III, Lord North, and the People and The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, both of which, and especially the latter, took a Whig view of their subject – as Bentley points out, Butterfield's historiography did evolve. It was Origins which brought the term ‘scientific revolution’ to the fore in the history of science with his ringing declaration that it outshone ‘everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom’. This book stemmed from a set of lectures that Butterfield had delivered the previous year and was part of his campaign to establish history of science as a subject in Cambridge to be studied by historians and not by scientists. In this he was opposed by the Marxist biochemist turned sinologist Joseph Needham (1900–1995), an opposition that Bentley does not seem to appreciate.

This oversight, together with Bentley's not really telling us what Butterfield did as a college and university administrator (outside history), other than that he was overpromoted, are really only minor criticisms of what is an excellent, revealing, entertaining and well-written account of one of the twentieth century's major historians. Bentley, like this reviewer, is left with a slightly ambivalent impression of Butterfield. He was clearly influential in a number of specific areas and he continues to be quoted, even though much of his work is now dated. He opposed vehemently the approach of Lewis Namier (1888–1960) and his school, preferring a more literary and narrative style of history; that historiographical division remains with us. He failed to write a number of books that he worked on, especially about Charles James Fox and so on. But what Bentley does do, both explicitly and structurally in his text, is to show that historians are not free agents working outside society and history, but are subject to and constrained by the circumstances in which they find themselves – and that is surely something that Butterfield would have agreed with.