About

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her first popular history book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 and Mary Beard called it ‘microhistory at its absolute best’ while Dan Jones considered it ‘glorious’. Its highly-acclaimed sequel, Mr Barry’s War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as ‘a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful’.  Caroline teaches Public History to postgraduates at the Centre for Archives and Information Studies at the University of Dundee, and during 2017 was a Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library. Her third book, National Treasures, about the evacuation of London’s galleries and museums in the Second World War, will be published by John Murray in November.