I’m a writer and broadcaster specialising in modern cultural history. My most recent book is The BBC: A People’s History (Profile Books) – published in the USA as The BBC: A Century on Air. It’s an ‘authorised’ biography which appeared in 2022 to coincide with the Corporation’s Centenary.

My previous books include Life on Air: A History of Radio Four (Oxford University Press, 2007), which won the Longmans-History Today Book of the Year Award, and Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (Profile Books, 2013), which accompanied a BBC Radio 4 series – that I also wrote and presented. Over the years, I’ve contributed articles and book reviews to a range of publications, including BBC History Magazine, History Today, New Humanist, the Observer, the Independent, the Wall Street Journal, and the Cambridge Literary Review. 

Aside from being a writer, I’m an Emeritus Professor of the University of Sussex, where I taught media history between 2013 and 2021. Before that, I taught at the University of Westminster in London and held Visiting Research Fellowships at the universities of Cambridge, Yale, and Indiana-Bloomington.

After studying history at the universities of St Andrews and Oxford, I spent seven years in the 1980s and 1990s working at the BBC as a current affairs reporter and producer on programmes including The World Tonight and Analysis (BBC Radio 4). More recently, I’ve written and presented a number of series for both BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 3. These include the thirty-episode series Noise: A Human History, broadcast on Radio 4 in 2013, as well as several editions of The Essay for Radio 3. In 2016, I wrote and presented Langston Hughes at the Third, a 45-minute Sunday Feature which explored the broadcasting career of the Harlem poet Langston Hughes. In 2011, I also co-wrote (with Ade Bean) a full-length Sunday drama for BBC Radio 3 called Between Two Worlds, which dramatised the life of the Victorian physicist and spiritualist, Oliver Lodge.

I’m currently working on my sixth book – about the tangled lives of Britain’s wartime propagandists. It will be published in 2026 by Profile Books.

My literary agent is Caroline Dawnay of United Agents.