W. A. Speck

William Arthur Speck (born Bradford, 1938) is a British historian specialising in late 17th and 18th-century British and American history.

He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and The Queen's College, Oxford, gaining a BA in 1960 and a D.Phil in 1966. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leeds and a Special Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham where he co-convenes an Interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar.

Works

• Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies 1701-1715 (Macmillan, 1970).
• Stability and Strife: England, 1714-60 (Edward Arnold, 1977).
• The Butcher: The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression of the 45 (Blackwell, 1981; second edition, 2013).
• ‘Whigs and Tories dim their glories: English political parties under the first two Georges’, in John Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy. Colloquies on Hanoverian Britain (Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 51–70.
• The Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford University Press, 1988).
• The Birth of Britain: A New Nation, 1700-1715 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
• Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, 1680-1820: Ideology, Politics and Culture (1998).
• James II (Longman, 2002).
• Robert Southey. Entire Man of Letters (2006).