Award winning author of a recent biography of Thomas Cromwell, A Life, Diarmaid is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, and TV presenter.
At the beginning of the introduction to his biography of Thomas Cromwell published in 2018, Diarmaid writes:
Thomas Cromwell’s name has happily become much more familiar in the last decade, thanks principally to Hilary Mantel’s inspired novel series beginning with Wolf Hall. To call them ‘historical novels’ does them an injustice; they are novels that happen to be set in the sixteenth century, and with a profound knowledge of how that era functioned. Novels they remain, as Mantel herself has frequently (and with mounting weariness), empathized to would be critics.’
Diarmaid’s wonderfully readable biography of Cromwell was The Sunday Times, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Spectator, Financial Times, Guardian, BBC History book of the year in 2018. As Hilary Mantel wrote,’ ‘This is the biography we have been awaiting for 400 years’ ,
Other critics described Diarmaid as ‘one of finest historians in the English-speaking world and preeminent in the area of the English Reformation. He has combined his expertise in 16th-century history with a compelling literary style in his latest book … the definitive work on Henry VIII’s great minister and an extraordinary insight into the politics and religion of the age, and of any age for that matter.’
At the Wolf Hall Weekend, Diarmaid will be revealing his insights into Thomas Cromwell’s true place in the making of modern England and Ireland, for good and ill, as well as recalling some of his conversations with Hilary, who he remembers fondly as an ‘intellectual companion’ during the writing of his book.
Diarmaid has written extensively on the sixteenth century and beyond it. His History of Christianity: the first three thousand years (Penguin/Allen Lane) and the BBC TV series based on it first appeared in 2009; the book won the Cundill Prize, the world’s largest prize for history, in 2010. His three-part TV series for BBC2, How God made the English, aired in March 2012, and his BBC2 series, Sex and the Church, aired in early 2015. He has written Silence: a Christian History (2013) and his collected essays on the Reformation appeared as All Things New: Writings on the Reformation in 2016. He was knighted in the UK New Year’s Honours List of 2012.
Other books by Diarmaid MucCulluch.
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