Richard Charles Vinen (born 1963) is a British historian and academic who holds a professorship at King's College London. Vinen is a specialist in 20th-century European history, particularly of Britain and France. [1]
Born in 1963 [2] in Birmingham, Vinen grew up on the Bournville Estate. [3] His father, Joe Vinen, was a professor of physics. [3] [4] [5] From 1982 to 1989, Richard Vinen attended Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1985, and then completing his doctoral studies there; [6] [7] his PhD was awarded in 1989 for his thesis "The politics of French Business 1936–1945", [8] supervised by Christopher Andrew. [9]
Vinen was a Fellow at Trinity from 1988 to 1992, and was a part-time lecturer at Queen Mary University of London from 1988 to 1991. [7] He eventually moved to London where he and his wife lived in a succession of louche locations early in his career. He has written that "the Serious Crime Squad once installed a camera in our bedroom so that they could keep an eye on one of our neighbours." [3] After lecturing at Queen Mary, he joined King's College London in 1991 as a lecturer; he was promoted to a readership in 2001, and was appointed Professor of History in 2007. [6] [7]
Vinen's book National Service: Conscription in Britain, 1945–1963 (2014) received generally positive reviews. [10] [11] On 13 May 2015, he was presented with a Wolfson History Prize and Templer Medal for it. [12] He also won the Walter Laqueur Prize in 2012 (recognising the best article in Journal of Contemporary History of the previous year) for "The Poisoned Madeleine: The Autobiographical Turn in Historical Writing". [7] [13] In 2018, Vinen delivered the Institute of Historical Research's Creighton Lecture on the topic "When was Thatcherism?". [14] In 2020, he was one of three historians invited to give the Historical Research Lecture; it was entitled "Writing histories of 2020". [15]
Sir Antony James Beevor, is a British military historian. He has published several popular historical works, mainly on the Second World War, the Spanish Civil War, and most recently the Russian Revolution and Civil War.
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George C. Peden is an emeritus professor of history at Stirling University, Scotland.
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Julian Timothy Jackson, is a British historian and academic. He is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London, and is one of the leading authorities on twentieth-century France.
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The Creighton Lecture is an annual lecture delivered at King's College, London on a topic in history. The series, which memorializes historian and prelate Mandell Creighton, began in 1907 with a grant of £650, half of which was donated by his widow, Louise Creighton.
Peter Hamish Wilson, FRHistS is a British historian. Since 2015, he has held the Chichele Professor of the History of War chair at All Souls College, University of Oxford.
Paul Andrew Readman, FRHistS, is a political and cultural historian. He is Professor in Modern British History at King's College London, where he was Head of the History Department (2008–12) and as of 2018 is Vice-Dean for Research.