Professor Peter Hennessy, historian

Professor Peter Hennessy is one of the UK’s leading contemporary historians. He has written acclaimed and important books about politics, the civil service, the intelligence agencies and the British constitution on which he is an expert. Peter was born in London in 1947 and read history at St John’s College, Cambridge. He started writing for the Times in the mid-1970s, covering the inner workings of Whitehall whose activities at that time were shrouded in secrecy. Peter says he approached his journalism like an amateur anthropologist trying to discover more about an unknown culture. His reports were...