Theodore Zeldin

Theodore Zeldin (born 22 August 1933) is an Oxford scholar and thinker whose books have searched for answers to three questions. Where can a person look to find more inspiring ways of spending each day and each year? What ambitions remain unexplored, beyond happiness, prosperity, faith, love, technology or therapy? What role could there be for individuals with independent minds, or who feel isolated or different, or misfits? Each of Zeldin’s books illuminates from a different angle what people can do today that they could not in previous centuries.

Theodore Zeldin was born on the slopes of Mount Carmel on 22 August 1933, the son of Russian-Jewish parents who later chose to become naturalised British subjects. His father was a civil engineer, an expert in bridge-building, a colonel in the Russian Czarist Army and a socialist who rejected the Bolsheviks; his mother, the daughter of an industrialist, was a dentist who completed her training in Vienna. Escaping from the Russian Civil War, they emigrated to Palestine, where he worked for the British Colonial Service building railways, but was disappointed by the failure of the movement for Arab-Jewish solidarity which, together with other scientists and intellectuals, he favoured, and of which the railwaymen’s trade union was a vocal advocate. Theodore Zeldin was educated at the English School Heliopolis (a mixed-sex boarding school) and at Aylesbury Grammar School. He graduated from London University (Birkbeck College) at the age of 17 in philosophy, history and Latin and then from Oxford University (Christ Church) in modern history, with Firsts from both, followed by a doctorate at the newly established St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has been a Fellow of St Antony’s since 1957 (now Emeritus); he was its Dean for thirteen years and played a leading role in developing it as the university’s centre for international studies. Now as an Associate Fellow of Green-Templeton College Oxford, he is active in its Future of Work project.

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