Its alumni includes former Home Secretaries, Lord High Chancellors, Archbishops of Canterbury, world leaders, Nobel laureate recipients, Victoria Cross holders, journalists and academics.

The early model has overtones of the gentleman's club, with one blackball in six enough to prevent election as a member and the Society colours being "claret, cider and coffee – the only drinks that were permitted at its meetings.

Today, the Society continues to provide opportunities for members to engage with like-minded practitioners and students with an annual garden party and dinner.

Female students from Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall and other new women's colleges joined eagerly, leading to the presidency of Ann Faber in 1942.

One of the first female members of the Society was a young Agnes Headlam-Morley who rose later to become Montague Burton Professor of International Relations - the first woman to be appointed to a chair at Oxford.

In over a century of continual activity, the Society has been addressed by a series of eminent speakers in meetings famous, sometimes notorious, for the combative discussion that ensues after a paper has been read.

[7] The speaker lineups have been appropriately diverse, ranging from Joseph Needham on the history of Chinese science, to Christopher Andrew on MI5, to Lord Sumption on the Royal Navy during the Hundred Years' War.

In one instance, the author Fernández-Armesto described how "Fatally pertinent questions reduced the excellent but academically underqualified historical writer Veronica Wedgwood to tears.

"[8] He continued: I recall an occasion when a visiting professor from Lancaster, who gave a talk on an early-18th-century Tory, wilted on being asked, "What have you added to what Macaulay has to say on the subject?"

Indeed, Paul Johnson, writing in the Spectator, recalled an episode involving Lord Dacre: That term, in 1948, I was due to be elected secretary at the final meeting.

However, when I and Karl Leyser arrived for the meeting, we found it packed with strangers, chiefly red-faced Christ Church louts, who looked as though they would have been more at home at a bump-supper or a Bullingdon Club grind.