• Paul Bailey
  • Michael Baldwin
  • Iain Banks
  • John Banville
  • Richard Barber
  • Juliet Barker
  • Pat Barker CBE
  • Sebastian Barker
  • Frank Barlow CBE FBA FRHistS
  • Correlli Barnett CBE
  • Sebastian Barry
  • Jacques Barzun
  • Susan Bassnett
  • Jonathan Bate CBE FBA
  • Nina Bawden CBE
  • Martin Bax
  • John Bayley CBE FBA
  • C.A. Bayly FBA FRHistS
  • Dame Gillian Beer DBE FBA
  • Antony Beevor
  • Rosalind Belben
  • Anne Olivier Bell
  • Bernard Bergonzi
  • Christopher Bigsby
  • Dea Birkett
  • Julia Blackburn
  • Malorie Blackman
  • Ronald Blythe, Benson Medallist
  • James T. Boulton FBA
  • William Boyd CBE
  • Melvyn Bragg (Lord Bragg)
  • Piers Brendon
  • Raymond Briggs
  • Robin Briggs
  • Michael Brock CBE FRHistS
  • Hugh Brogan
  • Anita Brookner CBE
  • Alan Brownjohn
  • James Buchan
  • Brian Burland
  • John Burnside
  • Marilyn Butler FBA
  • A.S. Byatt (Dame Antonia Duffy DBE)

Piers Brendon – Year of election 2010

Piers Brendon, Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, where until 2001 he was Keeper of the Churchill Archives, is a respected academic who writes distinguished books (some 14 of them) on recent history. The Dark Valley, a study of the 1930s, came out in 2000, and his major work, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, in 2007. “As I get older,” he says, “history absorbs me to the exclusion of most other forms of art and literature, so I do little but read about it and write about it - a strange, two-dimensional occupation, but for me the breath of life.”