Juliet Gardiner

Juliet Gardiner (24 June 1943 – 16 June 2026) was a British historian and a commentator on British social history from Victorian times through to the 1950s. She was an editor of History Today magazine, a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, and an honorary fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and at the University of Edinburgh. Gardiner taught at Middlesex University and Oxford Brookes University. She also worked as a publisher for Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Early years Gardiner was born on 24 June 1943

Work Gardiner was the editor of the History Today Companion to British History (1996), The Penguin Dictionary of British History (2000), and Who's Who in British History (2000). She worked as a historical consultant to the film of Atonement, and was a frequent broadcaster on radio and television, a reviewer and a contributor to the national press, including The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Guardian and BBC History.

She wrote extensively on 20th century social history, including tie-ins for Channel 4 television series The 1940s House (2000) and The Edwardian Country House (2002). She edited three books linked to exhibitions at London's Imperial War Museum, From the Bomb to the Beatles (1999), The Children's War: The Second World War Through the Eyes of the Children of Britain (2005) and The Animals' War: Animals in Wartime from the First World War to the Present Day (2006).

Gardiner's book on 1930s Britain, The Thirties: An Intimate History, was published in 2009. Its purpose was, Gardiner has said, to take the structure of the 1930s, formed over the years by political and economic historians, and "fill in as many details as possible" about how people lived their lives during that period.

In 2012, Gardiner wrote and presented The History of the Future, a ten-episode series for BBC Radio 4, which explored how cultures of the past viewed the possibilities of the future.

Personal life and death In 1961, she married George Gardiner, a British Conservative Party politician and journalist, Gardiner later married, divorced and remarried historian Henry Horwitz.

Selected bibliography The Blitz: The British Under Attack (2010) The Thirties: An Intimate History (2010) The Animals' War: Animals in Wartime from the First World War to the Present Day (2006) The Children's War: The Second World War Through the Eyes of the Children of Britain (2005) Wartime: Britain 1939–1945 (2004) The Edwardian Country House (2002) The 1940s House (2000) Who's Who in British History (editor) (2000) The Penguin Dictionary of British History (editor) (2000) From the Bomb to the Beatles (1999) History Today Companion to British History (editor, with Neil Wenborn) (1995)