William Shawcross

Writer and broadcaster William Shawcross were born on 28 May 1946 in Sussex, England, the son of Lord Shawcross. He was educated at Eton and University College, Oxford, and has worked as a journalist for the Sunday Times. He is a regular contributor to newspapers and periodicals including the New Statesman and the Washington Post.

He is the author of biographies of the Shah of Iran and media mogul Rupert Murdoch and of Deliver Us From Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict (2000), which addresses the complex moral and political arguments surrounding humanitarian intervention.

In 2004 he published Allies, an analysis of the alliance between Britain and the USA in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. His latest publication is Queen Elizabeth: The Official Biography of the Queen Mother (2009).

Shawcross writes and lectures on issues of international policy, geopolitics, Southeast Asia, and refugees, as well as the British royal family. He has written for a number of publications, including Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, in addition to writing numerous books.

His books include studies of recent international topics: the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, the Iraq War, foreign assistance, humanitarian intervention, and the United Nations. Two of them, Sideshow and The Quality of Mercy, were included on The New York Times Book Review's annual lists of the roughly 15 top books of the year for 1979 and 1984, respectively.

Since 2002, he has also written several books about the British royal family, including the official biography of Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, published in 2009. He writes glowingly about the royal family, for example, in an April 2020 piece about Queen Elizabeth II captioned "Thank God for the Queen": "One happy result of the horrible virus is that it has prompted the Queen to give us not one but two statements of her faith in this country and in God. Together they demonstrate vividly the exquisite, strong but light touch of our almost timeless monarch."

After leaving Oxford, Shawcross worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times and contributed to a book by its journalists on Watergate. In 1973, as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, Shawcross worked in Washington, DC, on the staffs of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representative Les Aspin.