Richard Vinen


Richard Charles Vinen 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.

Life

Vinen was born in Birmingham and lived on a road in the Bourneville Estate. His father was a professor of physics. From 1982 to 1989, he 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." He 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. He eventually moved to London where he and his wife lived in a succession of "amusingly louche" locations early in his career. He has written that "the Serious Crime Squad once installed a camera in our bedroom so that they could keep an eye on one of our neighbours." 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.
Vinen's book National Service: Conscription in Britain, 1945–1963 received generally positive reviews. 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 for "The Poisoned Madeleine: The Autobiographical Turn in Historical Writing".

Selected publications