The history of academic institutions can be instructive and even entertaining. Although a fruitful area of study, academic historians seldom write about their own professional affairs. This is in part because academic institutions tend to be unduly protective about access to their archives. This paper focuses not so much on the young Arnold Toynbee’s stormy and short-lived tenure of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History,Language and Literature at King’s College London, about which Richard Clogg has written in Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (1986), as on how the author came to write the book and some of the consequences of writing it. Papers to which he had access only after he had published Politics and the Academy suggest that Toynbee was unwise to have applied for the chair.