In 2005 Christ's college Cambridge is celebrating its quincentenary. It was founded by a remarkable woman – the mother of a King. Its alumni include two of the intellectual giants of the West, Milton and Darwin. And it has been immortally caricatured in one of the most famous university novels of the twentieth century, The Masters by C.P. Snow. In recent years it has also nurtured a succession of outstanding historians, many of them pupils or protégés of Sir John Plumb. These chapters have been written by some of those historians – all scholars of distinction, some of them household names. Their distinctive snapshots of Christ’s at different moments in time also reveal something of the rich variety of historical writing today – religious and intellectual history, biography, economics and the history of science.