Mark Bostridge
Mark Bostridge is a British writer and critic, known for his historical biographies.
Life and career
He was educated at Westminster School[1] and read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford, from 1979 to 1984.[2] At Oxford, he was awarded the Gladstone Memorial Prize. After university, he worked for a time for Shirley Williams, then President of the SDP. Later, he worked for BBC Television.
His first book was Vera Brittain: A Life, co-written with Paul Berry and published in 1995. This biography of the writer and peace campaigner
Bostridge's Lives For Sale, an anthology of biographers' tales, was published in 2004. In 2008, he published Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend, the first major biography of
In 2008, Bostridge also published Because You Died, a selection of Vera Brittain's First World War poetry and prose, to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the
In January 2014, Penguin UK published Bostridge's The Fateful Year, a portrait of England in 1914: "a year that started in peace and ended in war".
In June 2016, Bostridge was one of a group of biographers, historians, and other academics who signed a letter to The Times protesting at the erection of a statue to Mary Seacole at St Thomas' Hospital in London. In interviews Bostridge explained that he was not opposed to a statue to Seacole, but to the siting of it at the hospital where Florence Nightingale founded her nurse training school in 1860, influencing the development of nursing throughout the world. Bostridge argues that Seacole was not a "pioneer nurse" as some of the statue campaigners maintain. He also points to the way in which Nightingale's enormous contributions to public health are now commonly and mistakenly attributed to Seacole by a wide range of British institutions that, he says, should "frankly know better".
In an article published in the Times Literary Supplement in January 2020, Bostridge revealed that he has recently donated his diary to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.[7]
He is a brother of the tenor Ian Bostridge. They are the great-grandsons of the Millwall goalkeeper, John "Tiny" Joyce.[8]
References
- ^ Biography on Random House website
- ^ "Mark Bostridge (1979) wins Historical Biography Prize" St Anne's College Archived 2015-04-02 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Review: Florence Nightingale by Mark Bostridge".
- ^ "BBC Films sings with Loncraine, dances with Bourne".
- ^ Mark Bostridge (21 May 2012). "Vera's Testament is young again". The Daily Telegraph.
- ^ "The Fateful Year: England 1914, By Mark Bostridge: Book review - a landscape filled with strikes, spy fever and Suffragettes", The Independent, 14 January 2014. Accessed 20 May 2014
- ^ "Mark Bostridge on the diaries of Francis Kilvert essay - the TLS".
- ^ Bostridge, Mark (25 March 2006). "The name of the game". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 November 2015.
Independent on Sunday article on Mark Bostridge and Florence Nightingale, 28 September 2008