Peter Stothard
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FRSL | |
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Born | 28 February 1951 |
Nationality | British |
Education | Brentwood School, Essex |
Alma mater | Trinity College, Oxford |
Employer(s) | BBC News UK |
Spouses | |
Children | 2, including Anna |
Sir Peter Stothard
Early life
He was the son of Max Stothard, an electrical engineer who worked at the
Career
Stothard joined the
During a stage of Stothard's editorship, The Times reached an average sale of over 900,000 – the highest in its history. This was, in part, the result of the so-called "price war" that started in 1993 when The Times reduced its cover price and started intense circulation battles against The Daily Telegraph and The Independent.
In 1999, he became involved in a controversial legal dispute over political funding with the Conservative Party treasurer Michael Ashcroft. Lord Ashcroft sued, but subsequently withdrew his suit after a statement agreed by both parties.
Stothard was named as Editor of the Year in the same year by
In 2000, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and was away from The Times for 10 months for successful treatment. It returned in 2012 and 2013.
Whilst editor of The Times Literary Supplement, he often wrote about Greek and Roman literature.
In 2010, his first book of memoir, On the Spartacus Road, combined an account of the Spartacus uprising with elements of autobiography. His second, Alexandria, The Last Nights of Cleopatra, extended the same form, including accounts of newspaper life alongside the story of his engagement with Greece, Rome and Egypt. Alexandria... won the 2013 Criticos Prize for literature on themes from ancient or modern Greece. The Senecans: Four Men and Margaret Thatcher, his memoir of the 1980s and '90s, was published in September 2016. The critic Stuart Kelly described Stothard as "one of the most avant-garde practitioners of the form".[This quote needs a citation]
He was chairman of judges for the
Personal life
Stothard is married to the biographer and critic Ruth Scurr. He has a son, Michael (born 1987), and a daughter, the novelist Anna Stothard (born 1983) from his marriage to novelist Sally Emerson (1980-2021), and six grandchildren from that marriage. [4]
Honours
He was knighted for services to the newspaper industry in 2003.
In 2013, he was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy[2] and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.[5]
Bibliography
- Thirty Days: An Inside Account of Tony Blair at War (2004), ISBN 978-0-06-058262-3
- On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey Through Ancient Italy (2010), ISBN 978-0-00-734078-1
- Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (2013), ISBN 978-1-4683-0370-4
- The Senecans: Four Men and Margaret Thatcher (2016), ISBN 978-1-4683-1342-0
- The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar (2020), ISBN 978-0-19-752335-3
- Crassus: The First Tycoon (2022), ISBN 978-0-30-025660-4
- Palatine: An Alternative History of the Caesars (2023) ISBN 978-1-47-462099-4
Book reviews
Date | Review article | Work(s) reviewed |
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2011 | "The old BC/AD, BCE/CE : errors abound in Robert Hughes' history of Rome". Australian Book Review. 334: 8–9. September 2011. | ISBN 978-0-297-84464-8 .
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2014 | "All the roads to Waterloo". The Times Literary Supplement. November 2014. | ISBN 978-0-571-26952-5 .
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2015 | "The Ancient Art of Fooling Voters". The Wall Street Journal. March 2012. | ISBN 978-0-691-15408-4 .
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2015 | "How the Romans went about their business". Spectator. April 2015. | ISBN 978-1-4696-2128-9 .
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2015 | "Cities on the bay". The Times Literary Supplement. May 2015. | Hughes, Jessica (2015). Remembering Parthenope. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-967393-3 .
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2015 | "Antonia Fraser's summer afternoons". The Times Literary Supplement. July 2015. | ISBN 978-0-297-87190-3 .
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2015 | "Margaret Thatcher and the Britain she left behind". The Times Literary Supplement. November 2015. | Moore, Charles (2011). Margaret Thatcher. Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-7139-9288-5 .
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References
- ^ Stothard, Peter (Winter 2009). "Essex Clay". Granta. Archived from the original on 23 May 2013. Retrieved 13 July 2013.
- ^ a b "The British Academy President's Medal". British Academy. Retrieved 6 April 2023.
- ^ "Times Exclusive Level: FMV Transcripts". Archived from the original on 29 April 2011.
- ^ Nick Clark, "The bionic book worm", The Independent, 24 September 2012.
- ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 13 July 2023.