Kathleen Burk

Kathleen Burk was born in California and educated at the University of California in Berkeley and Oxford. She is Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London (UCL). A specialist in Anglo-American and European-American relations, she has published ten books of history, the two most recent of which are Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (2000) and Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (2007). She is an international judge of and writes on wine, publishing a book on the subject (with Michael Bywater) in 2008, entitled Is This Bottle Corked? The Secret Life of Wine. For some years she has been part of an amateur early music group, in which she plays a number of instruments, including the rebec and the bass viola da gamba.