Tristram Hunt
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Tristram Hunt (born 31 May 1974) is a British historian, broadcaster and newspaper columnist. He also lectures on Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.[1]
Tristram Hunt read history at Trinity College, Cambridge and the University of Chicago, and was for a time an Associate Fellow of the Centre for History and Economics at King's College, Cambridge. His PhD, Civic thought in Britain, c.1820- c.1860, was taken at Cambridge and was awarded in 2000. Before this, Hunt had worked for the Labour Party at Millbank Tower in the 1997 general election; he also worked at the Party's headquarters during the following 2001 general election.
Hunt was a fellow of the Institute for Public Policy Research and is on the board of the New Local Government Network (2004). He has made many appearances on television, presenting programmes on the English Civil War (2002), the theories of Isaac Newton, and the rise of the middle class, and makes regular appearances on BBC Radio 4, having presented broadcasts on such topics as the history of the signature. Hunt is an active New Labour supporter and Trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund and has a column with the UK Sunday paper The Observer. He wrote an essay in the New Statesman comparing Cromwell's Republic to the Islamic fundamentalism dominant in Afghanistan at that time.[2]
Hunt's main area of expertise is urban history, specifically during the Victorian era, and it is this subject which provided him with his second book, Building Jerusalem. This book, covering such notable Victorian minds as John Ruskin, Joseph Chamberlain and Thomas Carlyle received many favourable reviews, but some criticism, notably a scathing review in the Times Literary Supplement by J. Mordaunt Crook ('The Future was Bromley', TLS, 13 August 2004). In 2006, Hunt wrote Making our Mark, a publication celebrating CPRE's eightieth anniversary. He then completed a BBC series entitled The Protestant Revolution, examining the influence of Protestantism on British and international attitudes to work and leisure for broadcast on BBC Four.[3]
In the summer of 2007 he failed to be selected for the safe Labour seat of Liverpool West Derby. The successful candidate was Stephen Twigg [4].
Turning to biography, Hunt wrote The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (U.S. title: Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels), published in May 2009.[5] The book included original research from German and Russian libraries and begins with an account of Hunt's own trip to Engels, Russia.
Hunt, the son of Lord Hunt of Chesterton, is married with one son and lives in Haringey. His brother-in-law is the author Giles Foden.
[edit] References
- ^ University of London faculty page.
- ^ Tristram Hunt, "Britain's very own Taliban," New Statesman, 17 December 2001.
- ^ BBC, The Protestant Revolution.
- ^ Nick Coligan, "Stephen Twigg ends career of another political stalwart," Liverpool Echo, Sep 18 2007.
- ^ Roy Hattersley, "A communist and a gentleman," Guardian review.
