Daniel Snowman

Daniel Snowman (born 4 November 1938) is a British writer, lecturer and broadcaster on social and cultural history. His career has spanned the academic world and the BBC, while his books include Kissing Cousins (a comparative study of British and American social attitudes); critical portraits of the Amadeus Quartet and of Plácido Domingo; a study of the cultural impact of The Hitler Émigrés; an anthology of essays about today's leading historians; and The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera.

Snowman was born and raised in London, his parents coming from Anglo-Jewish families with roots in 19th-century Eastern Europe. He was educated at Cambridge (Double First-class degree in History) and Cornell (MA in Government) and from 1963–7 was a Lecturer in Politics and American Studies at the University of Sussex. In 1967, he went to the BBC for a 6-month stint as a radio producer, rejoining as a full-time staff member in 1970. In 1967, too, Snowman joined the London Philharmonic Choir, an ensemble with whom he sang for 48 years, and whose history he has written.

At the BBC, Snowman was responsible for a wide variety of radio programmes on cultural and historical subjects, working with such established broadcasters as Bernard Crick, Robin Day, Bill Grundy, Lord Hailsham, William Hardcastle and John Vaizey while also helping develop the broadcasting careers of such younger figures as Susan Hill, Aled Jones, Norman Lebrecht, Roy Porter, Edward Seckerson and Lucie Skeaping. Snowman tended to specialize in ambitious series such as The Long March of Everyman,Whatever Happened to Equality?, A World In Common (world development issues), World Powers in the Twentieth Century, Northern Lights (a Radio 4 festival about the Arctic) and Fins de Siècle, an attempt to enter and recreate the sound world of the final years of each of the past six centuries. Many of these later appeared as books which Snowman helped edit. After leaving the BBC at the end of 1995, Snowman turned increasingly to writing and lecturing. From 2004 he has held a Senior Research Fellowship at London University's Institute of Historical Research; in 2010 he delivered the IHR Annual Fellows’ Lecture.

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