Robert Winder – författare

In the spring of 1613 Mr William Shakespeare, a gentleman farmer in Warwickshire, returns to London. It is a ceremonial visit; he has no further theatrical ambitions. But the city is still reeling from the terrorist panic of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and fate soon forces him to take up his pen again. It was never possible to write about Henry VII while his granddaughter Elizabeth was Queen, but now he must. It is a perilous enterprise: King James I''s spies are everywhere.There is no evidence that Shakespeare wrote Henry VII, but in a compelling piece of historical recreation, Robert Winder asks: what if he did? And after 400 years, he gives us a unique world première - a brand-new, full-length Shakespeare play, incorporated brilliantly into this extraordinary novel.THE FINAL ACT OF MR SHAKESPEARE is an exhilarating portrait of England''s greatest author - not in love but raging against the dying of the light. It is an outrageous tour de force of theatrical imagination, full of the spirit of the Bard.

Immigration is one of the most important stories of modern British life, yet it has been happening since Caesar first landed in 53 BC. Ever since the first Roman, Saxon, Jute and Dane leaped off a boat we have been a mongrel nation. Our roots are a tangled web. From Huguenot weavers fleeing French Catholic persecution in the 18th century to South African dentists to Indian shopkeepers; from Jews in York in the 12th century (who had to wear a yellow star to distinguish them and who were shamefully expelled by Edward I in 1272) to the Jamaican who came on board the Windrush in 1947. The first Indian MP was elected in 1892, Walter Tull, the first black football player played (for Spurs and Northampton) before WW1 (and died heroically fighting for the allies in the last months of the war); in 1768 there were 20,000 black people in London (out of a population of 600,000 - a similar percentage to today). The 19th century brought huge numbers of Italians, Irish, Jews (from Russia and Poland mainly), Germans and Poles. This book draws all their stories together in a compelling narrative.

The Open Championship has been a high point of the British sporting calendar for 150 years, but few have been so memorable as in 2009. After four heady days on the fabled Turnberry links (one day it went see, the next it went saw) Tom Watson, an all-tim e great but nearly 60 and with an artificial hip, faced an eight-foot putt to become not just the oldest but also the most successful (along with Harry Vardon) player in Open history. The golfing world held its breath. History hung on the roll of a small white ball. As drama it verged upon the magical. Surely he couldn''t prevail; surely he couldn''t falter. But this was only one of hundreds of such moments. Robert Winder followed them all, from the start of the qualifying process to the dramatic last gasp. Here he traces the thrills and spills of a resonant sporting drama, listens to the players and administrators, and describes the many ways in which the Open truly is open: the world, to the elements, and to the neverending outrages of fortune.

It is often assumed that the national identity must be a matter of values and ideas. But in Robert Winder''s brilliantly-written account it is a land built on a lucky set of natural ingredients: the island setting that made it maritime; the rain that fed the grass that nourished the sheep that provided the wool, and the wheat fields that provided its cakes and ale. Then came the seams of iron and coal that made it an industrial giant.In Bloody Foreigners Robert Winder told the rich story of immigration to Britain. Now, in The Last Wolf, he spins an English tale. Travelling the country, he looks for its hidden springs not in royal pageantry or politics, but in landscape and history.Medieval monks with their flocks of sheep . . . cathedrals built by wool . . . the first shipment of coal to leave Newcastle . . . marital contests on a village green . . . mock-Tudor supermarkets - the story is studded with these and other English things.And it starts by looking at a very important thing England did not have: wolves.

In recent years the modern world has developed a brave new concept: ''soft power''. It is the power of friendly persuasion rather than command, and it invites nations to compete (as they did in the nineteenth century) to expand their ''sphere of influence'' as brands in a global marketplace.

In Bloody Foreigners and The Last Wolf, Robert Winder explored the way Britain was shaped first by migration, and then by hidden geographical factors. Now, in Soft Power he reveals the ways in which modern states are asserting themselves not through traditional realpolitik but through alternative means: business, language, culture, ideas, sport, education, music, even food - the texture and values of history and daily life. Moving from West to East, the book tells the story of soft power by exploring the varied ways in which it operates - from an American sheriff in Poland to an English garden in Ravello, a French vineyard in Australia, an Asian restaurant in Spain, a Chinese Friendship Hall in Sudan; the fact that fifty-eight modern heads of state were educated in Britain; the student exchange that took a teenage Deng Xiaoping to a small town on the Loire; the way that Japan could seduce the world with chic food and smart computer games. Now there may be a new twist in this Great game. With soft power''s quiet ingredients - education, science, trade, cultural values - and a new emphasis on shared mutual interest, it may be the only force supple enough to tackle the challenges the future looks likely to pose - not least the slam-the-door reflexes pulling in the other direction.