His most recent book, The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in November 2014.
[2] After joining the Scotsman as a graduate trainee in 1973, based in Edinburgh, in 1976 Wapshott moved to London to join the staff of The Times, working first in editor William Rees-Mogg's department as a letters page editor, then became a features editor during which time he wrote a series of long form profiles of politicians and artistic figures, among them the Labour leader Michael Foot, the heir apparent to the Labour leadership, Peter Shore, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown, playwrights Alan Bennett and Dennis Potter, and actors Dirk Bogarde and Alec Guinness.
[3][4] When Kenneth Thomson sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch, who installed Harold Evans as editor, Wapshott set up a weekly listings section, Preview.
He was the first to report on the early life of John Major, the surprise successor to Thatcher, and correctly predicted his unlikely rise with a timely profile that revealed that the family of the new prime minister had shared a landing with prostitutes, that his father had been a tight rope walker and latterly a maker of concrete garden gnomes, and that, during an extended period of unemployment, he had been beaten to a job as a bus conductor by a West Indian woman.
[6] He arrived three weeks before the September 11 attacks, but had returned briefly to London and was aboard the QE2 en route to New York when the Twin Towers fell.
He has been a regular guest on CNN,[8] MSNBC,[9] Fox News,[10] ABC[11] and the Charlie Rose Show[12] and contributed on American matters to The New Statesman.