Frances Stonor Saunders

Who is Frances Stonor Saunders?

Frances Hélène Jeanne Stonor Saunders is a British journalist and historian.

A few years after graduating with a first-class Honours degree in English from St Anne's College, Oxford, she embarked on a career as a television film-maker. Hidden Hands: A Different History of Modernism, made for Channel 4 in 1995, discussed the connection between various American art critics and Abstract Expressionist painters with the CIA. Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War, her first book, developed from her work on the documentary, concentrating on the history of the covertly CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom. Stonor Saunders' other works reflect her academic background as a medievalist.

In 2005, after some years as the arts editor and associate editor of the New Statesman, she resigned in protest over the sacking of Peter Wilby, the then-editor. In 2004 and 2005 for Radio 3, she presented Meetings of Minds, two three-part series on the meetings of intellectuals at significant points in history. She is also a regular contributor to Radio 3's Nightwaves and other radio programmes.