Veteran broadcaster James Naughtie is best known as one of the regular presenters on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. He has enjoyed a life in newspapers and broadcasting that has spanned almost 40 years, taken him around the world, thrown him together with an extraordinary cast of characters and given him a ringside seat at many of the events that have shaped our time.

Since joining the BBC in 1988, NaughJames Naughtie is one of the country’s best-known broadcasters. A special correspondent for BBC News, he presented Today on Radio 4 for 21 years and has written and presented a host of documentaries for radio and television. He has hosted Bookclub on Radio 4 since it began in 1998, and written and broadcast on literature and music for many years. As an author he has written books on politics and music, and an account of half a century of travels and encounters in the United States (‘On the Road -= American Adventures from Nixon to Trump). He is also the author of three espionage novels - The Madness of July, Paris Spring and the Spy Across the Water - featuring Will Flemyng of MI6. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.tie has worked on every presidential election and his store of American political trivia is the stuff of office legend. That American interest was the subject of his second book on the Blair era, ‘The Accidental American’ about Tony Blair’s relationship with George W Bush. He had previously published ‘The Rivals’, the book that first revealed the stormy nature of the relationship between Blair and Gordon Brown.

Naughties’ lifelong love of music and culture has made him a natural choice to present the televised Proms since 1992, Radio 3’s Opera News and Radio 4’s Bookclub and his 60-part series, The Making of Music (2007) for Radio 4 was voted radio programme of the year by The Voice of the Listener and Viewer.