James Hanning
© Broni Lloyd-Edwards
James Hanning’s THE BOOKSELLER OF HAY: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD BOOTH has garnered high praise since publication in Autumn 2025. Described by Stephen Fry as ‘a breathtakingly hilarious and absorbing portrait of one of the most brilliant, dotty, dippy delirious yet ultimately inspiring eccentrics in British history . . . A remarkable story of cultural life, friendship, obsession and passion' it tells the story of the man who turned Hay into a book town, attracted a coterie of exotic and illustrious followers, crowned himself king, declared the town's independence and provided the bookish backdrop which - to his frustration - allowed a rival attraction, the now world-famous Hay Festival, to flourish. Horatio Clare has declared it ‘the very model of a biography which amazes, occasionally horrifies and entirely engrosses’ and its author as a writer of ‘sublime insight, style and skill’.
James’s previous title was LOVE AND DECEPTION: PHILBY IN BEIRUT, the revealing story of how double agent Kim Philby fell in love with and married Eleanor Brewer before vanishing mysteriously in January 1963. The book was published by Corsair in 2021 in the UK and in the USA the following year.
CAMERON: THE RISE OF THE NEW CONSERVATIVE was James’s first book, written with Francis Elliott, his friend and colleague at the Independent on Sunday published by Fourth Estate in 2007. James went on to be the paper’s Deputy Editor and Francis to be political editor of the Times. Their biography, the first, of then New Tory leader and now Prime Minister, David Cameron, broke much new ground and received excellent critical acclaim. CAMERON was significantly updated when it was published in paperback in 2009 and again in 2012.
In 2014 James wrote THE NEWS MACHINE: HOW THE TABLOID NEWS IS MANUFACTURED, in collaboration with Glenn Mulcaire, the News of the World’s chief investigator who went to prison for his part in the phone hacking scandal. James was the first journalist to be taken into Glenn Mulcaire’s confidence, who talked exclusively about extensive unlawful activity at the newspaper. The book, described by Peter Oborne as ‘reading like a thriller’, was published by Gibson Square Books.
James Hanning lives in west London with his wife Emma Robertshaw and their daughters Eleanor and Alice.