I am a writer and cultural historian and am a Professor in the English department at King’s College London. I am fascinated by the relationship between life, literature and history and in my books I attempt to find new ways of writing that can allow the three to intertwine. Most recently, I have written Custody: The Secret History of Mothers, which tells the 200 year history of child custody through the stories of seven women – Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears – who have fought for their children and been found wanting.
Before that I wrote two bibliomemoirs. Look! We Have Come Through! takes D.H. Lawrence’s life and work as a starting point in thinking through our contemporary world. Free Woman is an investigation of freedom that’s part memoir and part biography of Doris Lessing. I interweave life and literature to think about motherhood, sex, madness and communism, testing the gains and costs of living freely.
My acclaimed novel, The Group, uses Mary McCarthy’s landmark 1963 novel as a model for thinking through contemporary women’s lives in twenty-first century London.
The Bitter Taste of Victory is an account of the experiences of twenty of the British and American cultural figures sent in to Germany after the war, and The Love-charm of Bombs is about five writers in London in the Second World War. Both these books move fluidly between cultural and political history, collective biography and literary criticism while also attempting to create a narrative that unfolds with drama and suspense. Both books are set in war zones and I am intrigued by the way that war acts as a catalyst in transforming lives and creating art.
I grew up in London and studied English at Oxford University, going on to do an MA at University College London and a PhD at the University of Sussex. I have been teaching at King’s since 2008 and all my books have been in part the result of conversations with colleagues and students in the English department and the School of Arts and Humanities.
I have been the recipient of a European Research Council Starting Grant and a Philip Leverhulme Prize, awarded by the Leverhulme trust. I set up and for a decade ran the Ivan Juritz Prize, which celebrates creative experiment in all art forms.
I review regularly for various publications (most frequently the Guardian ) and have judged the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize, the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. I also co-curated (with John-Paul Stonard) an exhibition, Melancholia. A Sebald Variation which featured previously unseen works by Tacita Dean and Anselm Kiefer. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
I live in Oxfordshire and have a fourteen-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter.