About
Geoffrey Wheatcroft was born in London in two days before Christmas 1945, the son of an economist and a teacher, and educated as a scholar at University College School in Hampstead and a Scholar of New College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. After university, he studied typography at the London College of Printing and spent several fruitless years in publishing, as a designer, publicity manager and editor, before leaving involuntarily but gratefully for journalism, which has been his trade ever since.
In 1975, Alexander Chancellor had just been made editor of the weekly Spectator and asked Wheatcroft to join. There he spent six very happy years, and from 1977 to 1981 was Literary Editor as well as columnist and reporter. He left to report from South Africa, and to write his first book. The Randlords, the story of the South African mining magnates and their legacy, was published in 1985 to enthusiastic acclaim both in England, where it was a Sunday Times bestseller, and the United States, where it was a History Book Club Choice. In 1985-6 Wheatcroft was "Londoner's Diary" Editor of the Evening Standard, whose opera critic he subsequently became.
After several years as a columnist with the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Express he is now once more freelance. He has written frequently for the Guardian, Spectator, TLS,London Review of Books and Prospect in London, and in America for the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and particularly the New York Review of Books, for which he has written several Churchillian essays. He was formerly a Contributing Editor to the New Republic, and for some years he broadcast as the British correspondent for Radio Ireland in Dublin. Over nearly twenty years he has been a regular visitor to the British Studies Seminar of the University of Texas in Austin, and his talks there, a number on Churchillian subjects, have been republished in successive volumes of the Adventures with Britannia series.
In 1989 he published Absent Friends, a collection of biographical sketches, and in 1996 The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, The Jewish State, and The Unresolved Jewish Dilemma, a study of Zionism and its effect on the Jewish people, which won an American National Jewish Book Award. After writing a sports column for the Financial Times,and covering bike racing for the Daily Mail as a summer diversion, he published Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France 1903-2003 in 2003, short-listed for an NSC Sports Book Prize and a bestseller in several editions. His next book, The Strange Death of Tory England in 2005, was short-listed for the Channel 4 News Political Book Prize, and was followed in the spring of 2007by his philippic Yo, Blair!, itself shortly followed by Blair’s departure, alas not thanks to the power of the author’s pen.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is married to Sally Muir, the painter and fashion designer. They have an adult daughter and son, two whippets, and live in Bath, where Wheatcroft spends as much time as he can listening to music, collecting books, watching cricket, and fishing. He says that he isn’t an academic writer or a polymath but a workaday journalist and a jack of all trades. Paul Johnson once wrote in a book review that “Wheatcroft himself is an example of the Grub Street professional, now increasingly rare: part scholar, part boulevardier, well-read and tolerant in the ways of the world,” a description he was content with then and is now.