Richard Vinen

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]

Life

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]

Books

• The Politics of French Business 1936–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN 0521404401
• Bourgeois Politics in France, 1945–1951. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0521474515^[16]
• France, 1934–1970. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. ISBN 0333613597
• A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century. London: Little, Brown, & Co., 2000. ISBN 0316853747
• The Unfree French: Life under Occupation. London: Penguin, 2006. ISBN 0300121326^[17]
• Thatcher's Britain. London: Simon & Schuster, 2009. ISBN 9781847371751
• National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945–1963. London: Allen Lane, 2014. ISBN 184614387X
• The Long '68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies. London: Allen Lane, 2018. ISBN 0241343429
• Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2022. ISBN 0241454565