Colin Jones

Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He is CBE and a Fellow of the British Academy.

The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford, 2015), was widely praised and listed in book-of-the-year lists for 2015 by many national media. He specialises in the history of France, and his numerous early books include The Great Nation: France from Louis XIV to Napoleon, 1715-99 (Penguin, 2002); Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress (National Gallery, 2002); Paris: Biography of a City (Penguin, 2004: winner of the Enid MacLeod Prize); The Saint-Aubin ‘Livre de caricatures’: Drawing Satire in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Voltaire Foundation, 2012); and Versailles (Head of Zeus, 2018).

From 2012-15, Jones held a Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowship, focusing on the day of 9 Thermidor when Robespierre was overthrown. This led to the publication of a book, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris, which was published by OUP in 2021 to wide media acclaim. The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement all chose it as on their Books of the Year. Hilary Mantel praised the book as ‘vital, incisive, revelatory… It takes us to the place, to the instant, to the heartbeat of a revolution in the making.’ The Fall of Robespierre was also shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2021, an annual award celebrating the very best non-fiction writing from the past year.

Photo courtesy of Ron Jautz