Matthew Sweet is co-writer, with Mark Gatiss, of Bookish. He presents Free Thinking on BBC Radio 4 and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians (Faber, 2001), Shepperton Babylon (Faber, 2005), The West End Front (Faber, 2011) and Operation Chaos (Picador 2018). His 25 years of television and radio programmes include The Culture Show (BBC2), Checking into History (C4), five series of The Philosophers Arms (Radio 4) and 1922: The Birth of Now, a ten-part history of modernism (Radio 4). He has been film critic of the Independent on Sunday, photography critic of Newsweek and fashion columnist for 1843/The Economist. His film Liberation Radio screened in the 2021 London Film Festival and at the Manzi gallery in Hanoi. In 2017 he and the baker Frances Quinn achieved a chocolate-related Guinness World record that held good until 2022, when it was broken by Ant and Dec. His crime novel The New Forest Murders (Simon and Schuster) and his biography The Great Dictator: The Life of Barbara Cartland (Hodder) are forthcoming.
