Education
Hilton was educated at William Hulme"s Grammar School, Manchester, and New College, Oxford, where he obtained a first class honours degree in Modern History.
Hilton was educated at William Hulme"s Grammar School, Manchester, and New College, Oxford, where he obtained a first class honours degree in Modern History.
He specialises in modern British history, from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century. From 1969-1974 he was a Research Lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. He was elected a fellow of Trinity College in 1974.
In 2007, he was "promoted by the University to an ad hominem Professorship and—"partly on the strength of his widely acclaimed..volume in the New Oxford History of England"—a Fellow of the British Academy.
England 1783-1846, published in 2006, is part of the New Oxford History of England. Tristram Hunt, in a 2006 review, called it a "lively and wide-ranging study that is mercifully free of dry chronology" and a "comprehensive, intriguing and challenging volume".
He notes it includes "studies of Pitt, Fox, Liverpool and Canning" as well as "accounts of phrenology, mesmerism and even early 19th-century flagellatory literature" and a "welcome concentration on economic and business matters".