Richard Vinen

Richard Charles Vinen (born 1963) is a British historian and academic who holds a professorship at King's College London. Vinen is a specialist in 20th-century European history, particularly of Britain and France. His last book is The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle, published in 2025.

Life Born in 1963 in Birmingham, Vinen grew up on the Bournville Estate. From 1982 to 1989, Richard Vinen attended Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1985, and then completing his doctoral studies there; his PhD was awarded in 1989 for his thesis "The politics of French Business 1936–1945", supervised by Christopher Andrew.

Academic career Vinen was a Fellow at Trinity from 1988 to 1992, and was a part-time lecturer at Queen Mary University of London from 1988 to 1991.

After lecturing at Queen Mary, he joined King's College London in 1991 as a lecturer; he was promoted to a readership in 2001, and was appointed professor of history in 2007. On 13 May 2015, he was presented with a Wolfson History Prize and Templer Medal for it. He also won the Walter Laqueur Prize in 2012 (recognising the best article in Journal of Contemporary History of the previous year) for "The Poisoned Madeleine: The Autobiographical Turn in Historical Writing". In 2018, Vinen delivered the Institute of Historical Research's Creighton Lecture on the topic "When was Thatcherism?". In 2020, he was one of three historians invited to give the Historical Research Lecture; it was entitled "Writing histories of 2020".

Books The Politics of French Business 1936–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bourgeois Politics in France, 1945–1951. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. France, 1934–1970. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century. London: Little, Brown, & Co., 2000. The Unfree French: Life under Occupation. London: Penguin, 2006. Thatcher's Britain. London: Simon & Schuster, 2009. National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945–1963. London: Allen Lane, 2014. The Long '68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies. London: Allen Lane, 2018. Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2022. The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle. London: Bloomsbury, 2025.