Sir Peter Stothard is a British author, journalist and critic. From 1992 to 2002 he was editor of The Times and from 2002 to 2016 editor of The Times Literary Supplement, the only journalist to have held both roles. His four books of diaries cover both political and classical themes.
Stothard joined the BBC after leaving university, writing for the New Statesman, New Society and Plays and Players. He joined The Sunday Times in 1978 and The Times in 1981 where he was chief leader writer, deputy editor and US editor, based in Washington. He published Thirty Days: An Inside Account of Tony Blair at War in 2004 which was based on observations inside Downing Street during the Iraq War. During Stothard's editorship, The Times reached a circulation of more than 900,000 – the highest in its history. This was, in part, the result of the so-called "price war" that started in 1993 when The Times reduced its cover price and started intense circulation battles against The Daily Telegraph and The Independent. In 1999 he became involved in a controversial legal dispute over political funding with the Conservative Party Treasurer, Michael Ashcroft. Lord Ashcroft sued but subsequently withdrew his suit after a statement agreed by both parties. Stothard was named as Editor of the Year in the same year by Granada Television's What the Papers Say. In 2000 he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and was away from The Times for 10 months for successful treatment. Whilst editor of The Times Literary Supplement he often wrote about Greek and Roman literature. In 2010 his first book of memoir On the Spartacus Road combined an account of the Spartacus uprising with elements of autobiography. His second, Alexandria, The Last Nights of Cleopatra, extended the same form, including accounts of newspaper life alongside the story of his engagement with Greece, Rome and Egypt. Alexandria won the 2013 Criticos Prize for literature on themes from ancient or modern Greece. The Senecans: Four men and Margaret Thatcher, his memoir of the 1980s and 90s, was published in September 2016. The critic, Stuart Kelly, described Stothard as 'one of the most avant-garde practitioners of the form'. He was chairman of judges for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and President of the Classical Association. In 2017 he was appointed a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. Stothard appears as a character briefly in the first scene of a one-level Tomb Raider expansion videogame made by Core Design in association with The Times. The expansion is called and was released in 2000.
