Jasper Ridley

Jasper Godwin Ridley (25 May 1920 – 1 July 2004) was a British writer, known for historical biographies. He received the 1970 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography Lord Palmerston.

Born in West Hoathly, Sussex, he was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford and the Sorbonne. He trained and practiced as a barrister, before starting to write. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector and was, by his own account, violently abused while in a detention camp. He served on St Pancras Borough Council from 1945–49, and stood, unsuccessfully, as Labour Party candidate for Winchester in 1955 general election.

Works

• The Tate Gallery's Wartime Acquisitions (1942)
• The Law of the Carriage of Goods by Land, Sea and Air (1957)
• Nicholas Ridley (1957)
• Thomas Cranmer (1962)
• John Knox (1968)
• Lord Palmerston (1970)
• Garibaldi (1974)
• The Roundheads (1976)
• Napoleon III and Eugénie (1979)
• The History of England (1981)
• Statesman and the Fanatic: Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More (1982)
• Life and Times of Mary Tudor (1973)
• Henry VIII the Politics of Tyranny (1984)
• The Tudor Age (1988)
• The Love Letters of Henry VIII (1988) editor
• Elizabeth I: the Shrewdness of Virtue (1988)
• Maximilian & Juarez (1992)
• Tito (1994)
• A History of the Carpenters' Company (1995)
• Mussolini (1997)
• The Freemasons: A History of the World's Most Powerful Secret Society (1999)
• The Houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha: A Royal History of England (2000) with John Clarke
• Bloody Mary's Martyrs: The Story of England’s Terror (2001)
• A Brief History of The Tudor Age (2002)

External links

• Obituary in the Daily Telegraph, 8 July 2004
• http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext17/Mildiscp.html