Bryan Appleyard

Bryan Appleyard was educated at Bolton School and King’s College,. Cambridge. He was Financial News Editor and Deputy Arts Editor at The Times until 1984. He has subsequently written for many publications including The Sunday Times, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Spectator and the New Statesman. He has been Feature Writer of the Year three times at the British Press Awards and Interviewer of the Year once. In the 2019 Birthday Honours list he was he was appointed Commander of the British Empire for services to the arts and journalism.

Books in order of publication:

The Pleasures of Peace (1989)

Understanding the Present (1992)

How to Live Forever or Die Trying (2007)

The Brain is Wider than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World (2011)

The Car: Biography of the Machine That Invented the World (2022)

Praise for The Car

‘Very few people could do justice to this extraordinary story - and with this book Bryan Appleyard sets the bar impossibly high for anyone else.’ Rory Sutherland

‘An entertaining and superbly researched story about the industrial age's most astonishing and enchanting creation.’ Gavin Green

‘The car has totally changed our society.  Bryan Appleyard is just the writer to get to the heart of this phenomenon.’ Melvyn Bragg

‘As cars undergo their latest electro-smart evolution, Bryan Appleyard’s extraordinary cultural history of them explains how they changed our everyday experience. This is a brilliantly written and thoughtful account of the machines which made our lives recognisably modern.’ Michael Burleigh