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Robin Darwall-Smith

British archivist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ96468002
Source-derived summary

Robin Haydon Darwall-Smith (born 1963) is a British archivist, based in Oxford and associated with several Oxford University College archives.

Education

Robin Darwall-Smith studied classics at University College, Oxford under George Cawkwell and Chris Pelling as an undergraduate and postgraduate. He then trained as an archivist at the University of Liverpool. While at Oxford, Darwall-Smith represented University College on the television quiz show University Challenge in 1987, reaching the series final.

Career

Darwall-Smith initially worked at the Oxfordshire Archives. Subsequently, he has been an archivist for Jesus College, Magdalen College, and University College at Oxford.

Robin Darwall-Smith was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2009 and of the Royal Historical Society in 2010. He appeared on the television documentary series Ian Hislop's Olden Days in 2014.

Some of his papers are held by the Archive at University College, Oxford.

Selected books

Robin Darwall-Smith has written a number of books, including:

The Jowett papers: A summary catalogue of the papers of Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893) at Balliol College, Oxford.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Robin Darwall-Smith” is british archivist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Robin, Darwall-Smith and British, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1963, 1987, 2009, 2010—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Robin, Darwall-Smith and British is the immediate research focus.
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The phrase “british archivist” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q96468002. VIAF identifies the subject as 34357872. The Library of Congress control number is nr96034068. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1987, 2009 and 2010.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Robin Darwall-Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.