Richard Davenport-Hines (born 1953) is a British writer, best known for his biography of the poet W. H. Auden.
An alumnus of Cambridge University, he has taught at the London School of Economics, and began writing business history. He was the 1985 winner of the Wolfson Prize for History and Biography. He now writes and reviews in a number of literary journals, he is a noted contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography, as of March 2009 he had contributed 152 biographies.
He has also written on the history of the Gothic. He is a member of the Athenaeum Club in London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society.
Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior (1984)
Markets and Bagmen, Studies in the History of Marketing and British Industrial Performance, 1830 — 1939 (1986)
Speculators and Patriots: Essays in Business Biography (1986)
Business in the Age of Reason (1987) editor with Jonathan Liebenau
Enterprise Management and Innovation (1988) with Geoffrey Jones
British Business in Asia Since 1860 (1989) editor with Geoffrey Jones
The End of Insularity - Essays in Comparative Business History (1989) editor with Geoffrey Jones
Business in the Age of Depression & War (1990) editor
Capital Entrepreneurs and Profits (1990) editor
Sex , Death and Punishment: Attitudes To Sex & Sexuality In Britain Since The Renaissance (1990)
Glaxo A History to 1962 (1992) with Judy Slinn
The Macmillans (1992)
Vice - An Anthology (1993) editor
Auden (1995)
Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (1999: North Port Press. ISBN 0-86547-590-3, A voluminous, if somewhat patchy, chronological/aesthetic history of the Gothic covering the spectrum from Gothic architecture to The Cure.
The Pursuit of Oblivion: A global history of narcotics 1500-2000 (2001)
A Night at the Majestic (2006), on Sydney Schiff's dinner of the talents