Richard Davenport-Hines

Richard Peter Treadwell Davenport-Hines[1][2][3] (born 21 June 1953 in London)[4] is a British historian and literary biographer, and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

[5] Davenport-Hines was educated at St Paul's School, London (1967–71)[6] and Selwyn College, Cambridge (which he entered as Corfield Exhibitioner in 1972 and left in 1977 after completing a PhD thesis on the history of British armaments companies during 1918–36).

He is a judge of the Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize for Poetry awarded annually since 2009 to members of King's College London – named in commemoration of his son who died on 9 June 2008, aged 21.

He also inaugurated the Cosmo Davenport-Hines Memorial Lecture given from 2010 to 2015 under the joint auspices of King's College London and the Royal Society of Literature.

These include an essay on English and French armaments dealers operating in eastern Europe in the 1920s in Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, Helga Nussbaum and Alice Teichova (editors), Historical Studies in International Corporate Business (1989); an essay on HIV in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (editors), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science (1994); a historical critique of drugs prohibition laws in Selina Chen and Edward Skidelsky, High Time for Reform (2001); a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to W.H.