John Burrow (m. 1954) studied history at Christ's and became one of Britain's leading intellectual historians, with a truly global reputation.  Having taught at Sussex University between 1969 and 1995, he ended his academic career as Professor of European Thought at Oxford. 

He won the Wolfson Prize for A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981) and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1986.  Other major books include The Crisis of Reason: European Thought 1848-1914 (2000) and most recently his vivid and highly readable account of history writing over the centuries - A History of Histories (2007). 

He will be known to many members of Christ's for his chapter 'The Age of Reform' in the College history, Christ's: A Cambridge College over Five Centuries (2005).