The Indefatigable Asa Briggs - Adam Sisman, at Heffers Bookshop

Asa Briggs’s energy fuelled him to write more than fifty books, including five formidable volumes on the history of broadcasting. At the zenith of his fame he was one of the best-known historians of his generation, his name on a cover a guarantee of substantial sales.

From humble beginnings in the back streets of Keighley, he rose to become a peer of the realm, one of the Great and the Good. He was Vice-Chancellor of Sussex, the most fashionable of the new universities, and Chancellor of the Open University, the largest. He became President of the Workers’ Educational Association, reflecting his deep commitment to a more equal society. His own life illustrated the power of education to overcome disadvantage.

Adam Sisman is a writer specialising in biography, who has written the lives of A. J. P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and John le Carré. His second book, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, won a National Books Critics Circle award. ‘Mr Sisman has an ideal biographical style: inquisitive and open, serious yet not severe,’ Dwight Garner wrote in theNew York Times, ‘I’d read him on anyone.’ Sisman has also edited several volumes of letters, including two volumes of letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 2019 he published a short book about a con man,The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews.

Join us as welcome Adam Sisman to Heffers on the 6th of November, in conversation with Professor Peter Burke, to discuss the monumental historian Asa Briggs.

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