Theodore Zeldin CBE (born 22 August 1933) is a scholar and current Associate Fellow of Green-Templeton College, Oxford. He is the author of A History of French Passions, a quotidian history of the French people, [1] [2] as well as An Intimate History of Humanity. [3] He is also a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, having previously been its dean for 13 years, and a member of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature.
Theodore Zeldin was born on 22 August 1933, the son of Russian-Jewish parents who later chose to become naturalised British subjects. His father was a civil engineer, an expert in bridge-building, a colonel in the Russian Czarist Army, and a socialist who rejected the Bolsheviks. Zeldin's mother, the daughter of an industrialist, was a dentist who completed her training in Vienna. Escaping from the Russian Civil War, Zeldin's parents emigrated to Palestine, where his father worked for the British Colonial Service building railways. He was disappointed by the failure of the movement for Arab-Jewish solidarity, which he favoured together with other scientists and intellectuals, and of which the railwaymen's trade union was a vocal advocate. [4]
Zeldin was educated at the English School Heliopolis (a coeducational boarding school) and at Aylesbury Grammar School. He graduated from Birkbeck, University of London at the age of 17, having studied philosophy, history, and Latin, and then from Christ Church, Oxford studying modern history. He received Firsts from both, followed by a doctorate from the newly established St Antony's College in Oxford. He has been a Fellow (now Emeritus) [5] of the college since 1957 and was its dean for thirteen years, playing a lead role in developing it as the university's centre for international studies. Now, as an Associate Fellow of Green-Templeton College, Oxford, he is active in its Future of Work project. [6]
Zeldin has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a member of the European Academy. He has been decorated as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Commander of the Légion d'Honneur and a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. Zelda also holds the Wolfson Prize, Britain's top award for History.
He has been married to Deirdre Wilson, the co-inventor of relevance theory, since 1975; they live in an Art Deco house outside Oxford. His hobbies are 'gardening, painting and mending things'. [7]
Camille Hyacinthe Odilon Barrot was a French politician who was briefly head of the council of ministers under king Louis Phillipe in 1848–49.
The Second French Empire, officially the French Empire, was the government of France from 2 December 1852 to 4 September 1870 between the Second and the Third French Republics. Ruled by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the period was one of significant achievements in infrastructure and economy, while France reasserted itself as the dominant power in Europe.
Émile de Girardin was a French journalist, publisher and politician. He was the most successful and flamboyant French journalist of the era, presenting himself as a promoter of mass education through mass journalism. His magazines reached over a hundred thousand subscribers, and his inexpensive daily newspaper La Presse undersold the competition by half, thanks to its cheaper production and heavier advertising. Like most prominent journalists, Girardin was deeply involved in politics, and served in parliament. To his bitter disappointment, he never held high office. He was a brilliant polemicist, a master of controversy, with pungent short sentences that immediately caught the reader's attention.
Le Guide Culinaire is Georges Auguste Escoffier's 1903 French restaurant cuisine cookbook, his first. It is regarded as a classic and still in print. Escoffier developed the recipes while working at the Savoy, Ritz and Carlton hotels from the late 1880s to the time of publication. The hotels and restaurants Escoffier worked in were on the cutting edge of modernity, doing away with many overwrought elements of the Victorian era while serving the elite of society.
Agénor de Gramont, 10th Duke of Gramont was a French diplomat and statesman who also had the title Prince of Bidache.
Sir Alistair Allan Horne was a British historian and academic best known for his works about armed conflicts involving 19th- and 20th-century France, including his classic about the Algerian War, A Savage War of Peace. A former spy and journalist, Horne wrote more than 20 books on travel, history, and biography.
Robert Nigel Gildea is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford and is the author of several influential books on 20th century French history.
Colin James Bundy is a South African historian, former principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford and former SOAS University of London director. Bundy was an influential member of a generation of historians who substantially revised our understanding of South African history. In particular, he wrote on South Africa's rural past from a predominantly Marxist perspective, but also deploying Africanist and underdevelopment theories. Since the mid-1990s, however, Bundy has held a series of posts in university administration. Bundy is also a trustee of the Canon Collins Educational & Legal Assistance Trust.
The Walcheren Campaign was an unsuccessful British expedition to the Kingdom of Holland in 1809 intended to open another front in the Austrian Empire's struggle with France during the War of the Fifth Coalition. John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, the commander of the expedition, was ordered to capture the towns of Flushing and Antwerp and thus enable British ships to safely traverse the Scheldt River.
David Samuel Harvard Abulafia is an English historian with a particular interest in Italy, Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge, rising to become a professor at the age of 50. He retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History. He is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He was Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, 2003-5, and was elected a member of the governing Council of Cambridge University in 2008. He is visiting Beacon Professor at the new University of Gibraltar, where he also serves on the Academic Board. He is a visiting professor at the College of Europe.
Presidential elections were held for the first time in France on 10 and 11 December 1848, electing the first and only president of the Second Republic. The election was held on 10 December 1848 and led to the victory of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte with 74% of the popular vote. This was the only direct presidential election until the 1965 French presidential election. The six candidates in the election, in order of most votes received, are Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte of the Bonapartists, Louis Eugène Cavaignac of the moderate Republicans, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin of the Montagnards, François-Vincent Raspail of the Socialists, Alphonse de Lamartine of the Liberals, and Nicolas Changarnier of the Monarchists.
Antony Andrewes, was an English classical scholar and historian. He was Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford from 1953 to 1977.
Green Templeton College (GTC) is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The college is located on the former Green College site on Woodstock Road next to the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter in North Oxford and is centred on the architecturally important Radcliffe Observatory, an 18th-century building, modelled on the ancient Tower of the Winds at Athens. It is the university's second newest graduate college, after Reuben College, having been founded by the historic merger of Green College and Templeton College in 2008.
Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on genocide. The Forward calls him "one of the foremost scholars of Jewish life in Galicia."
Olivier Émile Ollivier was a French statesman. Starting as an avid republican opposed to Emperor Napoleon III, he pushed the Emperor toward liberal reforms and in turn came increasingly into Napoleon's grip. He entered the cabinet and was the prime minister when Napoleon fell.
Joseph Louis Félix Garrigou was a French physician, prehistorian and hydrologist. He is known for his investigations of prehistoric artifacts and remains found in caves of southern France (Pyrenees). Also, he was the author of numerous writings on mineral waters from a chemical/medical perspective.
Uwe Kitzinger, CBE was a German-born British academic who specialised in international relations. He was the first British economist at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg from 1951 to 1956, and in January 1973 to June 1975 Political Adviser to the first British Vice-President of the European Commission in Brussels, who was charged with External Relations.
The Émile Ollivier ministry was the penultimate government of the Second French Empire. Led by Émile Ollivier, a republican opponent of the Empire, it was initially composed of moderate bonapartists and orléanists. However following the constitutional referendum on 8 May liberal members of the cabinet resigned and were replaced with politicians of a more authoritarian type. It lasted from 2 January 1870 until 10 August 1870, on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, when it was replaced by the Cousin-Montauban ministry. It was often referred to at the time as the Ministry of 2 January.
Roman Krznaric is an Australian-born social philosopher, whose books focus on the power of ideas to create change. His international bestsellers, including The Good Ancestor and Empathy, have been published in more than 25 languages. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at Linacre College, University of Oxford and the founder of the world's first Empathy Museum. His latest book, History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity, explores what we can learn from the last 1000 years of global history to tackle urgent issues ranging from the climate crisis to the risks of artificial intelligence.
Nevill Barbour was a BBC journalist and reporter who wrote about the Arab world.
