Frances Stonor Saunders

Journalist and historian

Frances Stonor Saunders is a British journalist and historian. She graduated with a first-class Honours degree in English from St Anne's College, Oxford, in 1987. Following her degree she began a career as a television film-maker. Her documentary Hidden Hands: A Different History of Modernism was released in 1995, and Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War followed four years later.

Stonor Saunders later worked as the arts editor and associate editor of the New Statesman, but resigned in protest in 2005 over the sacking of editor Peter Wilby. She has also contributed to radio, presenting Meetings of Minds for Radio 3, a series on the meetings of intellectuals at significant points in history. She is the author of several books, including Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman (2004) and The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (2010), the biography of Violet Gibson, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who attempted to assassinate Benito Mussolini in 1926.