Frances Stonor Saunders

Frances Stonor Saunders is a journalist, broadcaster, and historian. She began in television, making Hidden Hands: A Different Story of Modernism for Channel 4 in 1995, before publishing an accompanying book, Who Paid the Piper? CIA and the Cultural Cold War, developed from her documentary work, in 1999. She has acted as both arts editor and associate editor of the New Statesman, and presented BBC Radio 3's Meeting of Minds in 2004-5, a series documenting the meetings of intellectuals across history. In 2010 she published The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, a biography of the Honourable Violet Gibson, detailing in particular her attempt to assassinate Benito Mussolini in 1926 and up to the time of her death in a Northampton mental asylum in 1956.