Peter Hennessy
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| Peter Hennessy | |
| Occupation | Historian |
|---|---|
| Known for | Prize winning author |
Peter Hennessy is an English historian of government. Since 1992, he has been Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Hennessy was the youngest of a large Irish Catholic family and he was brought up in large council houses, first in Aladial Avenue and then in Linhurst Gardens, Finchley, London.[1] He went to the nearby Our Lady of Lourdes primary school, and on Sundays he went to St Mary Magdalene Church, where he was an altar boy.[1] He was a subject of the first episode of the BBC radio 4 series The House I Grew Up In first broadcast on 6 August 2007 in which he talked about his childhood.[1]
From the early 1970s, Hennessy was a journalist. He wrote leaders for The Times, for which he was also the Whitehall Correspondent. He was The Financial Times' Lobby Correspondent at Westminster and he wrote for The Economist. He co-founded the Institute of Contemporary British History in 1986. He was a regular presenter of Analysis on BBC Radio 4 from 1987 to 1992. From 1994 to 1997, he gave public lectures as professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.
His analysis of post-war Britain, Never Again: Britain 1945-1951, won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1992 and the NCR Book Award in 1993.
On November 17, 2005, he made a trenchant appearance alongside Lord Wilson of Dinton before the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee on the publication of political memoirs.
His study of Britain in the 1950s and the rise of Harold Macmillan, Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s, won the 2007 Orwell Prize for political writing.[2]
[edit] Bibliography
- Cabinet (1986)
- Whitehall (1989)
- Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (1992)
- The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution (1995)
- The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 (2000)
- The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (2002)
- Having It So Good: Britain 1951-64 (2006)
- Cabinets and the Bomb (2007) ISBN-13: 978-0-19-726422-5 Oxford University Press
[edit] References
- Guest, Fiona. 'Peter Hennesy FBA', Staff of QMUL Department of History, 2005. Retrieved December 31, 2005.
- 'Corrected Oral Transcript of Oral Evidence presented to the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee on the publication of political memoirs on 17 November 2005 by Lord Wilson of Dinton and Professor Peter Hennessy', 7 December 2005. Retrieved December 31, 2005.
[edit] See also
- list of Gresham Professors of Rhetoric
