Richard Vinen

Richard Charles Vinen is a British professor of history at King's College, London. Vinen is a specialist in European twentieth century history, particularly Great Britain and France. He was born in Birmingham and lived on a road in the Bourneville Estate. His father was a professor of physics. Vinen attended Trinity College, Cambridge. Later he 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." His first academic post was at Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary University of London) and he joined King's in 1991.

Vinen's latest book National Service: Conscription in Britain, 1945–1963 (2014) received generally positive reviews. On 13 May 2015 he was presented with a Wolfson History Prize and Templer Medal for it.

Selected publications

• Bourgeois Politics in France, 1945–1951. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• France 1934–1970. London, Macmillan, 1996.
• A History in Fragments, Europe in the Twentieth Century. Little Brown, 2000. (also published in Spanish and Italian)
• The Unfree French. Life under Occupation. London, Penguin, 2006.
• Thatcher’s Britain. Simon & Schuster, 2009.
• National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945–1963. Allen Lane, August 28, 2014.