Education
Street Anne"s College.
Street Anne"s College.
Foreign the male version of this name, Francis Saunders (disambiguation)
A few years after graduating (in 1987) with a first-class Honours degree in English from Street Anne"s College, Oxford, she embarked on a career as a television film-maker. Hidden Hands: A Different History of Modernism, made for Channel 4 in 1995, discussed the connection between various American art critics and Abstract Expressionist painters with the Central Intelligence Agency. Who Paid the Piper?: Central Intelligence Agency and the Cultural Cold War (1999) (in the United States of America: The Cultural Cold War: The Central Intelligence Agency and the World of Arts and Letters), her first book, developed from her work on the documentary, concentrating on the history of the covertly Central Intelligence Agency-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom. Stonor Saunders" other works reflect her academic background as a medievalist.
In 2004 and 2005 for Radio 3, she presented Meetings of Minds, two three-part series on the meetings of intellectuals at significant points in history.
She is also a regular contributor to Radio 3"s Nightwaves and other radio programmes. Her second book, Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman (The Devil"s Broker in the United States), recounts the life and career of John Hawkwood, a condottiere of the 14th century.
English-born, Hawkwood (1320–1394) made a notorious career as a participant in the confused and treacherous power politics of the Papacy, France, and Italy. The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (2010) is a biography of Violet Gibson, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat who shot Benito Mussolini in 1926, wounding him slightly.
Frances Stonor Saunders is the daughter of Julia Camoys Stonor and lives in London.