Andrew Robinson, the son of an Oxford University physicist, is a King’s Scholar of Eton College and holds degrees from Oxford University (in chemistry) and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is currently a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
He has received a number of academic grants for his research, notably a fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, a research grant from the British Academy, and a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation for 2007-09 to make a study of creativity in the arts and sciences.
He has worked for Macmillan Publishers (1979-82), Granada Television (1983-88), the independent television production company Brian Lapping Associates (1989-90), and as literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement in London (1994-2006). He has extensive experience of editing reviews, essays and books written by authors in fields ranging from physics through finance to literature. In 2007, he became a fulltime writer of books and journalism.
He is the author of more than fifteen books, published by leading general and academic publishers, in both the UK and the USA, several of which have been used as teaching texts in universities. These have been translated into many European languages, as well as Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. They have covered three main areas:
As a journalist, he has written features and reviews for many national newspapers and magazines in the UK, USA and India. These include The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The New York Times; and New Scientist, Nature, The Lancet, Physics World, The Spectator, History Today, Current World Archaeology and Sight and Sound. He has also appeared on BBC Radio and BBC Television, and acted as a consultant to two BBC TV programmes based on his work.