Dr Colin Shindler

Colin Shindler has maintained an active interest in twentieth century American and British social and cultural history whilst pursuing a wide-ranging career as a writer and producer in television, radio and motion pictures, and as an author of books and journalism for over thirty years.  He graduated with a degree in History from Cambridge and remained at Gonville & Caius College to complete his PhD thesis later published as Hollywood in Crisis (1996).  His other monograph on Hollywood and American society, also published by Routledge was Hollywood Goes to War . 

He has been lecturing and teaching undergraduates and postgraduates at Cambridge since 1998 but he is more widely known as the screenwriter of the feature film Buster starring Phil Collins and Julie Walters, the producer of the BBC drama series Lovejoy with Ian McShane as the East Anglian antiques dealer and as the author of the childhood memoir Manchester United Ruined My Life.  He wrote and presented Sport and the Movies for BBC Radio Four’s Archive on Four in November 2010 as well as a monthly newsletter for The Film Programme.  Little Brown published his most recent bestseller, an oral history of National Service in May 2012 and on the same day Headline brought out the second part of his autobiography Manchester City Ruined My Life.  He has been frequently heard on The Today programme and PM on Radio 4 which in 2013 broadcast Rumours, his feature length play on Private Eye and the Profumo Affair. In 2015 his biography of Bob Barber the Cambridge University and England test cricketer was widely reviewed and has been short-listed for the MCC Cricket Book of the Year Prize.  

Four Lions, an analysis of post-war England football captains as a mirror of social history, appeared in May 2016 and his latest book I Speak for Many Others: Unpublished Letters to the BBC was published in September 2017.