Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a journalist and author. In 1975, he joined the weekly Spectator as Assistant Editor, and from 1977 to 1981 was Literary Editor as well as columnist and reporter. He left to work freelance, to report from South Africa, and to write his first book, The Randlords. In 1985-6 he edited the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ of the Evening Standard, whose opera critic he subsequently became.

After several years as a columnist with the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Express he is now once more freelance, writing regularly for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the TLS in London, as well as the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Boston Globe, Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s in America. He was formerly a Contributing Editor to the New Republic, and for some years he broadcast as the British correspondent for Radio Ireland in Dublin.

He was born in London, the son of an economist and a social worker, and educated at University College School in Hampstead and as a Scholar of New College, Oxford, where he read Modern History.