Jeremy Paxman

Born in Leeds on 11th May 1950, he attended Malvern College and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a degree in English. Beginning on local radio, he started his career in television in Northern Ireland, becoming the first full-time television current affairs reporter. In 1977 he joined the Tonight programme, and two years later Panorama, during which time he took assignments in Africa, the Middle East and Central America among many others. Since then television credits include the Six O'Clock News, Breakfast News, You Decide with Paxman and Radio 4's Start the Week, and presented Newsnight between 1989 and 2014. In 2000 he was made an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge and St Edmund's Hall, Oxford, and has an honorary LLD from Leeds and DLitt from Bradford (both 1999).

books

• A Higher Form of Killing (1982)
• Through the volcanoes: a Central American journey (1985)
• Friends in high places: Who Runs Britain? (1990)
• Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life (1991)
• The English: A Portrait of a People (1998)
• The Political Animal (2003)
• On Royalty (2006)
• The Victorians: Britain Through the Paintings of the Age (2009)
• Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British (2011)
• Great Britain's Great War (2013)

quick trivia

• During his time at Cambridge University, he became editor of the student newspaper Varsity, a post also held at one time by Richard Whiteley.
• During the now notorious 1997 interview he asked the Home Secretary Michael Howard a total of fourteen times whether he had threatened to overrule Derek Lewis, Head of the Prison Service.
• In 2000, an Enigma machine was stolen from Bletchley Park, it was later returned when the thieves posted it to Jeremy!
• He is a keen fly fisherman, and has cited Isaak Walton's The Compleat Angler as his favourite book