Llewellyn Woodward was a member of All Souls for 34 years. He is nowadays most remembered as the Professor of International Relations in Oxford who was appointed in 1944 as editor of the hefty series of Documents of British Foreign Policy, which began publication under official auspices in 1947. He had an influential detractor in A. J. P. Taylor, who damned him with faint praise as ‘technically competent and conscientious’, and called him ‘a great operator’, meaning toady, who protected the reputations of officials.

Woodward, in turn, considered Taylor to be dishonest. The references of twenty-first century scholars to Woodward remain grudging. Jonathan Haslam wrote in 2021 of the ‘complacency’ of those ‘knights of the realm’ who were chosen by Whitehall committees ‘to write elegant official histories or edit Foreign Office documents with due diligence, such as Sir Llewellyn Woodward.’ Martin Ceadel, in his account of the academic specialization of international relations at Oxford, shows as much respect for Woodward’s humour as for his professional qualifications. Woodward’s research into diplomatic history began in the autumn of 1918 when, after being invalided from the army, he was recruited to the Foreign Office’s Historical Section. There, among other tasks, he wrote a monograph which was published, under the title Congress of Vienna 1878, by His Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1920. After Hitler withdrew Germany from the Disarmament Conference in 1933, he was given privileged access to Foreign Office documents, which were closed to other scholars, and thus enabled to write a study of the Anglo-German naval armaments race before 1914. The resultant book, published as Great Britain and the German Navy by Oxford University Press in 1935, served official ends. During the war of 1939–45 he compiled an internal Foreign Office narrative of British diplomacy: an abridgement was published as British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (1962); the full six volumes were released during the 1970s. Undeniably, Woodward was a diplomatic historian who had the trust of senior diplomatists. Yet, although for ten years from 1951 he held a professorship at New Jersey’s version of All Souls, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, he had only remote kinship with English academic students of the developing discipline of international relations. His ideas and procedures seem remote from those of Alastair Buchan or Adam Roberts.