Professor John Guy (KES 1959-1966)

John Guy (above left) won an Open Exhibition to Clare College, Cambridge in 1966. He went up to Cambridge the following year and read History under the supervision of Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton, the pre-eminent Tudor scholar of the late-twentieth century.

He took a First and became a Research Fellow of Selwyn College in 1970. His PhD was on Cardinal Wolsey. He has lectured extensively on Early Modern British History and Renaissance Political Thought in Britain and the United States, publishing 16 books and 51 academic articles, as well as book reviews in journals and the newspapers. He is co-editor of the acclaimed academic series, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. My Heart is my Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Harper Perennial, 2004) won the 2004 Whitbread Biography Award. Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 1990) is regarded as a classic and has sold over 250,000 copies worldwide.

He is a Fellow in History at Clare College, University of Cambridge and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He has previously been an Assistant Keeper at the National Archives, a Lecturer in History, and later Reader at the University of Bristol, and Professor of Modern History, Head of the School of History and International Relations, and Provost and Vice-Principal for Research at the University of St Andrews. He has held appointments in the United States at the University of California Berkeley, theJohns Hopkins University, and the University of Rochester. He appears regularly on BBC radio and television including the Timewatch film ‘The King's Servant' and the four-part ‘Renaissance Secrets' (series 2). He currently writes or reviews for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Economist, the Times Literary Supplement, the BBC History Magazine, and History Today