Education: Haunted Historian

To his classmates at Harrow, George Macaulay Trevelyan seemed, as he himself tells it, like "a 'swot' of the worst kind . . . socially [a] misfit . . . a complete muff at cricket, and clumsy at football." He was "wrapped in literary and historical imaginings," and he was also a crashing bore. "I never had dreams of being a general, or a statesman or an engine-driver, like other aspiring children . . . I wanted to be [a] historian."

In time, George Trevelyan's dream came true. His monumental England Under Queen Anne...