Degrees

B.A. (Hons.) (Rhodes University, S.Africa); M.A. (Cambridge); Ph.D. (Cambridge)

Main publications, prizes, fellowships

T. S. Ashton Prize of Economic History Society (1976) (for ‘Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms in the Lancashire Cotton Industry’);

Crime and The Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (Europa, 1980), eds. V. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker;

The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford, 1995): Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society;

City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (Atlantic, 2006): awarded Wolfson Literary Prize for History, and English PEN’s Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History.  Listed for Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) Prize and runner-up for Authors' Club Sir Banister Fletcher Prize for Art History;

The First Bohemians: Life and Art in Eighteenth-Century London (2013): shortlisted for English PEN’s Hessell-Tiltman Prize;

Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London (2022): short listed for the Duff Cooper Prize 2022.

1998, Visiting Fellowship at Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

2002, Visiting Fellowship at Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University.

Research interests

British cultural and social history

See Wikipedia for fuller biography