William Whyte

Biographic Data

ID272104
NAMEWilliam Whyte
GIVEN NAMESWilliam
FAMILY NAMEWhyte
SIGNATUREWHYTE W
AFFILIATIONSSt John’s College , Oxford
ORCID0000-0002-6067-1952
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS61
TOTAL CITATIONS463
AUTHOR COUNT50
EDITOR COUNT11
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1944
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX4

  • Modernism’s Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital , by Ijlal Muzaffar

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2025

  • Building Schools, Making Doctors: Architecture and the Modern American Physician, by Katherine L. Carroll

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2023

    Journal Article Building Schools, Making Doctors: Architecture and the Modern American Physician, by Katherine L. Carroll Get access Building Schools, Making Doctors: Architecture and the Modern American Physician, by Katherine L. Carroll (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022; pp. 438. $65). William Whyte William Whyte St John’s College, Oxford, UK [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academi…

  • Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain

    William Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe Journal of Modern History2023

  • An Episcopal Puzzle: George Richmond’s Monument to Bishop Charles James Blomfield (1859–67)

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEJournal of Victorian Culture2022

    George Richmond’s memorial to Charles James Blomfield, Bishop of London between 1828 and 1856, is both important and puzzling. Yet it now attracts little attention. In Blomfield, it commemorates neither a famous hero nor an obviously notorious villain. Its creator, Richmond, was well known in his day, but has hardly retained his réclame. Even those who have sought to highlight Richmond’s importance are inclined to conclude that this example of hi…

  • The spaces and places of schooling: Historical perspectives

    Open AccessCatherine Burke, William Foote Whyte et al.ARTICLEOxford Review of Education2021

    (2021). The spaces and places of schooling: historical perspectives. Oxford Review of Education: Vol. 47, The Spaces and Places of Schooling: historical perspectives by guest editors Catherine Burke and William Whyte, pp. 549-555

  • Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and its Stories, by Barbara Black

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2021

    Writing this review in the middle of a coronavirus-induced lockdown, the idea of a place to which people travel, and where they mingle, and jostle, and dine together, dance together, even sleep together, seems little short of fantasy. And the critical point of this book is precisely that. Inspired by her own love of hotels and informed by a dazzling array of critical thinkers—from Bourdieu to Benjamin, from Foucault to Lefebvre, from Koestenbaum …

  • Histories, Meanings and Representations of the Modern Hotel, by Kevin J. James

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2020

    Writing in 1873, one American journalist described an alarming, moloch-like form that had appeared in the centre of almost every major city: What is it? Physically speaking, a monster structure, many stories in height, covering numerous city lots, containing rooms by the hundred, and more or less capable of giving comfortable lodgement to many hundreds and perhaps a thousand guests; but, under pressure like that of a Presidential convention, it c…

  • The Problem of Dyslexia: Historical perspectives

    Philip Kirby, Kate Nation et al.ARTICLEOxford Review of Education2020

    PERCY F. – a well grown lad, aged 14 – is the eldest son of intelligent parents, the second child of a family of seven. He has always been a bright and intelligent boy, quick at games, and in no wa

  • Class and classification: The London Word Blind Centre for Dyslexic children, 1962–1972

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEOxford Review of Education2020

    The Word Blind Centre for Dyslexic Children opened in London in 1963. It was not only the first clinic established in Britain specifically to cater for children diagnosed with dyslexia. It was also intended to provide compelling evidence that a condition called dyslexia actually existed. The results of this work were published in Sandhaya Naidoo’s path-breaking study, Specific Dyslexia, which did exactly what its promoters had hoped it would, dra…

  • Buildings, Landscapes and Regimes of Materiality

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLETransactions of the Royal…2018Cited by: 1References: 21

    Beginning with a surprisingly exuberant response to the landscape recorded by a distinguished scholar, this paper explores the agency of things and places though time. It argues that the recent ‘material turn’ is part of a broader re-enchantment of the world: a re-enchantment that has parallels with a similar process at the turn of the nineteenth century. Tracing this history suggests that within the space of a single generation the material worl…

  • The Too Clever by Half People’ and Parliament

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEParliamentary History2018Cited by: 1

    The role of intellectuals in shaping pressure on parliament has often been neglected and still more frequently downplayed. Even intellectuals themselves have doubted their own political importance; hence Walter Bagehot's observation that ‘the too clever by half people, who live in Bohemia , ought to have no more influence in parliament, than they have in England, and they can scarcely have less’. This article considers what it is to be an intelle…

  • Nottingham: A History of Britain’s Global University, by John Beckett

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2018

    Is Nottingham ‘Britain’s global university’? Of course not. In terms of global influence, it performs respectably, but not spectacularly. The most recent rankings saw it placed 147th in the Times Higher league, and somewhere similar in the Shanghai classifications. With branch campuses in China and Malaysia, it does have a global reach, to be sure. And it is only fair to note that these were the first branches established by any British instituti…

  • Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the Late Twentieth Century. By James Hinton

    William Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLETwentieth Century British History2017

    Recent events have famously—notoriously—called into question the validity of opinion polling. The British general election of 2015 and the referendum of 2016, and the apparently irresistible rise of Donald Trump: all these have proven problematic for the pollsters. True enough, it has always been possible to find some polls that, with hindsight, cleaved closer to the end result than others. In fairness, it must also be acknowledged that the final…

  • Only Connect’: Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by William C. Lubenow

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2017

    William C. Lubenow certainly knows his thinkers. Originally a historian of nineteenth-century government, he turned his attention to England’s intellectuals more than twenty years ago—and has never looked back. A series of well-received studies has been the result, including two books: The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (1998; rev. ante, cxiv [1999], 1,354–5) an…

  • The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World, 1680–1780, by Stephen Hague

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2016

    The small, square, loosely classical houses in the country erected in the eighteenth century may now be highly desirable, but they have not till now been the subject of intensive investigation. English architectural historians tend to focus on larger piles, concentrating their attention on grander Georgian country houses. Like a Jane Austen heroine, it is Pemberley, not Netherfield Park, that really gets them going. And, of course, this comparati…

  • Christmas and the British: A Modern History. By Martin Johnes

    William Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLETwentieth Century British History2016

    Christmas Day 1937 and the volunteers for Mass Observation are at it again: not so much observing as complaining for Britain. In Essex, a housewife quarrels with her husband and they end up eating in separate rooms. In Hampshire, a teacher is ‘depressed and gloomy’. In Surrey, despite her pleasure that young relatives were having a good time, another housewife regrets the amount of washing up she is forced to do. In Peterborough, a respondent dut…

  • Wisdom’s Workshop: The rise of the modern university

    William Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLESocial History2016

    Lecturing at the University of Edinburgh in 1901, the American psychologist William James observed that he spoke ‘with no small amount of trepidation’ to a European audience. ‘At my own University

  • Magna Carta, Religion, and the Rule of Law

    William Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEParliaments Estates and…2016

    Seated on the throne in the House of Lords each year, Queen Elizabeth II looks out at a sea of red velvet and ermine robes, red leather benches, golden metalwork and elaborate wooden statuary. Stan

  • The International Exhibition of 1862: The Illustrated Catalogue of the Industrial Department Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, by Alexander C.T. Geppert Exhibitions and th…

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2016

    Weighing in at just under a stone, the four-volume catalogue of the industrial products shown at the 1862 international exhibition can scarcely be described as user-friendly. Published to coincide with the great event, it is hard to imagine anyone lugging this brute of a book round the nearly 1,000 square feet of the exhibition building. Nor, it must be said, is the organisation of the various volumes all that helpful for the idle reader. A typic…

  • The Fox-Hunting Controversy, 1781–2004, by Allyson N. May

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2015

    ‘Tony Blair’s government will be remembered for two things’, Allyson May observes towards the beginning of this, her second, book; ‘the Iraq War and the ban on hunting with dogs’ (p. 1). Those of us who lived through the Blair decade might well quibble. Blair’s own memoirs, indeed, suggest that he thought the university tuition fees debate the most taxing of his premiership. And, in fairness, peace in Northern Ireland will surely rate at least a …

  • Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom, by Malcolm Chase

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2015

    Malcolm Chase’s marvellous, intelligent, accessible and original book retails at £70. It is such a shame—not least because the first two decades of the nineteenth century remain understudied and, still more importantly, under-appreciated by a non-professional readership. This could have been a book, the book, to persuade them that here is a fascinating historical topic. Alas, at that price, even university libraries will struggle to afford it. To…

  • The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, 1830–1930, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Peter Nockles

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2014

    Journal Article The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, 1830–1930, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Peter Nockles Get access The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, 1830–1930, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Peter Nockles (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2012; pp. 288. £60). William Whyte William Whyte St John’s College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue …

  • Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939, by Georgina Byrne

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteARTICLEThe English Historical Review2013

    Journal Article Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939, by Georgina Byrne Get access Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939, by Georgina Byrne (Woodbridge: The Boydell P., 2010; pp. 252. £55). William Whyte William Whyte St John’s College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 532, June 2013, Pages 726–728, https://doi.or…

  • Classes, Cultures, and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin

    Clare V J Griffiths, James J Nott et al.BOOKClasses, Cultures, and Politics2011

    Classes, Culture, and Politics investigates those fields in British history that have been illustrated by the works of Ross McKibbin, one of the foremost historians of twentieth century Britain. Written by a distinguished team of scholars, it examines McKibbin's life and thought, and explores the implications of his arguments. One of his most important achievements has been to break down the artificial barriers that existed between 'social' and '…

  • Modernism, Modernization and Europeanization in West African Architecture, 1944–94

    Open AccessWilliam Foote Whyte, William WhyteCHAPTEREuropeanization in the Twentieth…2010

    In 1944 the architect and author Edwin Maxwell Fry sailed to West Africa where he had been appointed town-planning adviser to the British Governor. A few months later his wife and partner, Jane Drew, joined him. Over the next decade they were to design a series of high-profile and highly important projects. They planned new towns and villages, built the University of Ibadan and the National Museum of Ghana, reshaped the nature of Nigerian and Gha…