- Two-Year Fellow, All Souls College (from 2020 to 2021)
- Research Fellow, London School of Economics (from 1982 to 1986)
- Undergraduate and postgraduate, University of Cambridge (from 1972 to 1977)
- Visiting Fellow, All Souls (2016)
- Oxford University public intellectuals of the twentieth century
- History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons, and the teaching of politics, statecraft and character (London: Collins, 2024).
- (edited) Hugh Trevor-Roper's China Journals: Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2020)
- Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the making of modern Britain (Collins, 2018)
- Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (Collins, 2015)
- An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (Collins, 2013)
- Ettie: the Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough (Weidenfeld, 2008)
- A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 (Faber, 2006)