Patrick Wright

Patrick Wright is one of our greatest living cultural historians, widely celebrated for his prescient, searching, inventive, indelible books from A Journey through Ruins to The Sea View Has Me Again. He has also worked as a journalist and broadcaster, putting out a variety of programmes on Channel 4, BBC2, Radio Three and writing for all the major broadsheets and monthlies. He is Emeritus Professor of Literature, History and Politics at King's College London.

Let his peers tell you about his books:

Francis Spufford: “Wright is a living national treasure of a rather weird variety: a historian who uses the imagistic logic of a fiction writer in the service of explanation, drawing out the many-sided truth of the past by letting unexpected connections form.”

William Boyd: “Wright is shrewd, wry and fiercely intelligent.”

Sukhdev Sandhu: “I don’t think there’s been a more original British cultural historian over the last forty years than Patrick Wright... he’s always textured, droll, a diviner who addresses topics and intuits significance years—often decades—before other more garlanded commentators.”

Mike Davis: "a saboteur of genres… his books encompass multiple worlds."

Boyd Tonkin: "a pin-sharp miniaturist who can see the world in a grain of sand."

Stuart Hall: "Patrick Wright explores the ways in which history itself has become the most powerful source of contemporary meanings about what Britain is and what it is to be British."

Tom Nairn: "a sensitive, ultra-thoughtful explorer of [the] national necropolis. With a large torch and copious notes he invites the reader to a number of meandering guided tours well off the main footpaths, some to disreputable tombs ignored by the many official study parties busy on this or that “Great Tradition”."

Will Self: "the sheer density of thought, allusion and fact is staggering—but what is more amazing is the deftness with which he spins from this a gossamer and entrancing narrative thread."

John Le Carré: "wit, style and waggish erudition. I was informed and delighted by his originality."

Iain Sinclair "Wright is a finder, a noticer, a powerful sustainer of argument. He brokers the most unlikely connections."

Billy Bragg: "For Wright, detail is everything and he clambers over the locked gates and barbed wire fences to discover a “deep England” of eccentric squires, quasi-fascistic communes and neolithic pathways."

Simon Schama: "Wonderful, illuminating, and astute. Not just a military history, Tank is a tour de force, a cultural history of our dreams and delusions."

Vera Rule: "Patrick Wright roamed east London from Dalston to Docklands back in the days when his friend Iain Sinclair was but a resident local eccentric and didn't yet own Hackney's rose-red empire. And Wright wrote this uncommon account of his investigations into London's orient aeons ago - well, 20-odd years - during the last major recession, when the then-new Canary Wharf stood alone, shedding tenants, among the stilled construction sites, while yuppies were lost in negative equity in their lofts converted from a notorious match factory. It was a peculiar but striking book when new, and read then as a political commentary on the Thatcher decade. But now that even the book's history seems postdated, Wright's work has become peculiarly permanent, an attempt at understanding ideas of England, its urban growth, its architecture and land use; its fantasies of itself, expressed in what is valued and how that is evaluated. The chapter on the National Trust is among the best and most original writing on the imagined past I've ever read."