Godfrey Hodgson has worked as a journalist for newspapers, magazines, radio and television in Britain and the United States. Born in 1934, he trained as an historian at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, and has written a number of books, most of them about twentieth century American history, including in In Our Time (1976): The Colonel, a biography of the American statesman Henry Stimson (1989); and a cultural history of Europe's great cities, A New Grand Tour (1995). Married with four children, he lives in Oxford, where he is the director of the Reuter Foundation Programme for journalists at Oxford University.

Copied from book jacket. © BBC Worldwide limited and Godfrey Hodgson 1995.

Author's photograph: Mark Gerson.