Richard Peter Treadwell Davenport-Hines[1][2][3] (born 21 June 1953 in London)[4] is a British historian and literary biographer, and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.[5]
Early life
Davenport-Hines was educated at St Paul's School, London (1967–71)[6] and Selwyn College, Cambridge (which he entered as Corfield Exhibitioner in 1972 and left in 1977 after completing a PhD thesis on the history of British armaments companies during 1918–36).[7] He was a research fellow at the London School of Economics (1982–86), where he headed a research project on the globalisation of pharmaceutical companies.[8] He was joint winner of the Wolfson Prize for History and Biography in 1985[9] and winner of the Wadsworth Prize for Business History in 1986.[10] He now writes and reviews in a number of literary journals, including the Literary Review and The Times Literary Supplement. He is an adviser to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to which (as of December 2022) he has contributed 169 biographies. During 2016, he was visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.[11]
He is a judge of the Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize for Poetry awarded annually since 2009 to members of King's College London – named in commemoration of his son who died on 9 June 2008, aged 21. He also inaugurated the Cosmo Davenport-Hines Memorial Lecture given from 2010 to 2015 under the joint auspices of King's College London and the Royal Society of Literature.
He has contributed to several volumes of historical or literary essays. These include an essay on English and French armaments dealers operating in eastern Europe in the 1920s in Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, Helga Nussbaum and Alice Teichova (editors), Historical Studies in International Corporate Business (1989); an essay on HIV in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (editors), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science (1994); a historical critique of drugs prohibition laws in Selina Chen and Edward Skidelsky, High Time for Reform (2001); a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden (2005); and a memoir in Peter Stanford (editor), The Death of a Child (2011).
Works
Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior (Cambridge University Press, 1984)[14]
Markets and Bagmen, Studies in the History of Marketing and British Industrial Performance, 1830–1939 (Ashgate, 1986) editor
Speculators and Patriots: Essays in Business Biography (Cass, 1986)
Business in the Age of Reason (Cass, 1987) editor with Jonathan Liebenau
Enterprise Management and Innovation (Cass, 1988) editor with Geoffrey Jones
British Business in Asia Since 1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1989) editor with Geoffrey Jones
The End of Insularity – Essays in Comparative Business History (Cass, 1989) editor with Geoffrey Jones
Business in the Age of Depression & War (Cass, 1990) editor
Capital Entrepreneurs and Profits (Cass, 1990) editor
Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes To Sex & Sexuality In Britain Since The Renaissance (Collins, 1990)
Glaxo: A History to 1962 (Cambridge University Press, 1992) with Judy Slinn
Hugh Trevor-Roper, China Journals: Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2020).[25] editor
Conservative Thinkers from All Souls College, Oxford (The Boydell Press, 2022)[26]
References
^Enterprise, Management and Innovation in British Business, 1914-80, ed. Richard Davenport-Hines and Geoffrey Jones, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1988, front matter
^Book Review Digest, March 2006 to February 2007 inclusive, vol. 102, ed. Clare Doyle, H. W. Wilson Co., 2006, p. 326
^The Cambridge University List of Members up to 31 December 1991, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 631
^Leslie Mitchell, ‘Fights for the Right’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 July 2006
^John Banville, ‘A Prince of the Essay’, New York Review of Books, 15 August 2013; Sir Michael Howard, ‘A good hater’s loves’, Times Literary Supplement, 10 February 2012
^John Banville, ‘A Splendid Introduction’, Guardian, 20 January 2014
^Michael Dirda, ‘A time when leaders and millionaires were also men of letters’, Washington Post, 23 January 2019
^Brian Young ‘How mad rich British left-wingers became China’s “useful idiots”’, Daily Telegraph, 4 July 2020