I am an author and curator based in Oxford, England. I write books and curate exhibitions about British art and culture from the 1890s to the 1960s.

I grew up in Boston, Lincolnshire, though this now feels so long ago that I almost picture it in black and white. When I was 11 we moved to Ripon, in North Yorkshire, and I tend to think of this, at least spiritually, as the place where I am ‘from.’ On leaving Ripon Grammar School I spent almost a year in Australia before going on to St John’s College, Oxford, to read ‘Modern History’ (which at Oxford is everything that comes after ‘Ancient History,’ so basically the Anglo-Saxons onwards). Then I studied for an MA in Art History at the University of Sussex, where the other students in my class included Jeremy Deller (winner of the Turner Prize in 2004) and Chris Stephens (director of the Holburne Museum in Bath). My dissertation, ‘Nature leaves Arcady for a railway station,’ on the British Surrealist movement, was supervised by Professor David Alan Mellor.

Having not really enjoyed academic art history very much I went eventually to Birkbeck College, London, and undertook research for a PhD in the History Department under Professor Michael Hunter. My thesis, completed in 1998, was on the eighteenth-century antiquary and natural philosopher, William Stukeley. This became my first book, which if I’d had my way would have been titled The Curious Itinerary of Dr. Stukeley, but it wasn’t. (I’ve found that publishers often don’t like taking risks with titles - or anything much else really - and this was before Mark Haddon’s best-selling novel with a similar, long-winded title was published.)

I then held academic research positions at Wolfson College, Oxford, the Clark Library at UCLA, and the London School of Economics, followed by a curatorial position at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Since 2009 I have lived back in Oxford with my wife and two children, writing, lecturing, teaching and curating. In my spare time I look at maps and my allotment, tend the garden, read lots of non-fiction, walk, cycle and play field hockey. I have failed but have on-going aspirations to write interesting novels and paint mixed media pictures.

My wife Susannah, who is Reader in French at the University of Warwick, took this photo of me when we were on holiday in France. She calls it my ‘official photograph.’ I don’t like having my photograph taken and this one was taken a long time ago, when I had more hair and youth and no children. The book I am reading in the photo is The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt. Her earlier novel, The Secret History, is probably my favourite book.