Veteran broadcaster James Naughtie is best known as one of the regular presenters on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. He has enjoyed a life in newspapers and broadcasting that has spanned almost 40 years, taken him around the world, thrown him together with an extraordinary cast of characters and given him a ringside seat at many of the events that have shaped our time.

Since joining the BBC in 1988, Naughtie has worked on every presidential election and his store of American political trivia is the stuff of office legend. That American interest was the subject of his second book on the Blair era, ‘The Accidental American’ about Tony Blair’s relationship with George W Bush. He had previously published ‘The Rivals’, the book that first revealed the stormy nature of the relationship between Blair and Gordon Brown.

Naughties’ lifelong love of music and culture has made him a natural choice to present the televised Proms since 1992, Radio 3’s Opera News and Radio 4’s Bookclub and his 60-part series, The Making of Music (2007) for Radio 4 was voted radio programme of the year by The Voice of the Listener and Viewer.