Richard Davenport-Hines author page

Richard Davenport-Hines biography

Richard Davenport-Hines is a British historian, biographer and author. He studied at the University of Cambridge and later worked as a research fellow at the London School of Economics. He has also held fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford, and is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society.

His books range across social, political, literary and business history. They include Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior, Auden, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics 1500-2000, An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes and Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain.

His Titanic Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew was published by HarperPress in 2012 to coincide with the centenary of the disaster. The book approaches the Titanic through the lives of the people connected with the ship, including those who built and owned it, members of the crew and passengers travelling in its different classes, placing their experiences within the wider social world of the Edwardian period.

Davenport-Hines won a Wolfson History Prize in 1985 for Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior. His later book History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons, and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft was published by William Collins in 2024.