John Vincent (historian)

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John Russell Vincent (born 20 December, 1937) is a British historian and a former Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He has been Professor of modern history at the University of Bristol since 1970. In the 1980s he was a columnist nn the The Times and The Sun newspapers, until student demonstrations at his university forced him to stop writing for the later newspaper. [1]

In 1995 Oxford University Press refused to publish a book on history by Vincent because of the lack of "inclusive" language. [2] [3]

In his entertaining and informative book on historiography, An Intelligent Person's Guide to History, Vincent notes that if we went solely by the documentary standards most prized by modern historians nothing would be more historically certain than that there were witches in the Middle Ages, given that we have a large volume of solemnly sworn testimony in original documents.

[edit] Publications

• John Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857-68 (Constable, 1966).
• John Vincent, Disraeli (Oxford Paperbacks, 1990).
• John Vincent, An Intelligent Person's Guide to History (Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 2005).
• Alistair Basil Cooke and John Vincent, Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885-86 (Harvester, 1974).
• John Vincent, 'The Thatcher Governments, 1979-1987' in Peter Hennessy and Anthony Seldon (eds.), Ruling Performance: British Government from Attlee to Thatcher (Blackwell, 1987).