Sir William Hartley Hume Shawcross was born on 28 May 1946 and is a British journalist, writer, and broadcaster.
27 Facts About William Shawcross
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William Shawcross has written for a number of publications, including Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, in addition to writing numerous books on international topics: the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, the Iraq War, foreign assistance, humanitarian intervention, and the United Nations.
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The eldest of three children, William Shawcross was born on 28 May 1946 in Sussex, to the barrister Hartley Shawcross and his second wife Joan Mather.
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William Shawcross's mother died in a riding accident on the Sussex Downs in 1974.
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William Shawcross's father died at the age of 101 in 2003.
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William Shawcross was educated at St Aubyns Preparatory School in Rottingdean, followed by Eton College, and University College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1968.
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In 1973, as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, Shawcross worked in Washington, DC, on the staffs of Senator Edward M Kennedy and Representative Les Aspin.
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From 1986 to 1996 William Shawcross was Chairman of ARTICLE 19, the international centre on censorship.
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William Shawcross was appointed a member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees's Informal Advisory Group in 1995, a post he held until 2000.
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William Shawcross was appointed to the chairmanship of the Charity Commission for England and Wales on 1 October 2012, serving 2 three-year terms as its chairman until February 2018.
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William Shawcross's appointment was controversially extended in 2015; a decision that was criticised as "rushed" for "political reasons" by his opponents.
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William Shawcross was appointed the Commissioner for Public Appointments in September 2021.
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Six days after beginning the investigation into Sharp's appointment, William Shawcross wrote to Julian Knight, the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, to recuse himself from its deliberations, disclosing that he had met Sharp "on previous occasions" which could give the impression of a prior conflict of interest.
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William Shawcross announced that he would be handing his investigation to an "independent person" to complete while retaining the other regulatory powers of his office.
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William Shawcross's politics have been described as having moved to the right over the course of his life.
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William Shawcross is a pronounced royalist, who is frequently complimentary of the Royal Family, for example in an April 2020 piece for The Spectator on Queen Elizabeth II, titled "Thank God for the Queen":.
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The change over time in William Shawcross's politics has been compared to the political shifts of his father Hartley William Shawcross, Paul Johnson, and Christopher Hitchens.
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William Shawcross's first published book was a biography of Alexander Dubcek, the leader of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring whose "socialism with a human face" briefly brought freedom into the Soviet Bloc.
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William Shawcross revised and reissued Dubcek in 1990 upon its subject's return to prominence and power during the Velvet Revolution, following two decades of rustication.
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Sideshow is, at least in the United States, William Shawcross's best known and most controversial book.
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William Shawcross, in turn, described Rodman's critique as "a rotten piece of work" and wrote a response, which The American Spectator published, with Rodman's further reply.
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William Shawcross included the entire exchange in later editions of Sideshow.
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When Rodman died in 2008, William Shawcross was "much saddened", as he later wrote, and sent Tyrrell a note expressing his grief.
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William Shawcross's identifying Cambodia as a UN success story drew particular quibbles, while several found fault with the book's analytical conclusions.
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William Shawcross was appointed Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in the 2011 New Year Honours and knighted in the 2023 Birthday Honours for public service.
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William Shawcross has lifelong ties to Cornwall where he is a keen campaigner in the preservation and protection of local Conservation Areas.
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William Shawcross's campaign succeeded in obtaining Grade II listing for St Mawes's historic and endangered sea wall.