James Hamilton is an art historian, biographer and curator at the University of Birmingham who has recently been elected to the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, for the academic year 1998/9. He went to Manchester University in 1966 to read Mechanical Engineering but graduated with a History of Art degree. He organised and wrote the catalogue of the exhibition Turner and the Scientists at the Tate (1998), and his biography of Turner was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Award (1997).