Peter Watson (journalist)

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Peter Watson

Peter Frank Patrick Watson (born April 23, 1943 in Birmingham ) is a British journalist, cultural and art historian, psychologist and author of crime novels.

Watson studied in Durham (B.Sc. degree in 1964, he received the University's Psychology Prize in 1961), London (Ph.D. 1967) and Rome (Diploma in Music 1965). From 1966 to 1968 he completed an internship at the Tavistock Clinic. He was then a journalist and deputy editor of New Society (1970 to 1973), the Sunday Times (as part of the "Insight Team" and 1977 to 1980 Assistant Editor), was a columnist in 1980/81 and New York correspondent in 1981/82 Times and wrote for the New York Times, the Observer, Punch, Spectator. Topics of his journalistic activities included art trade and art theft , about which he wrote the book "Double Dealer" (and made a television film), which received the Gold Dagger in 1983. Some of his detective novels are also set in the art scene, for example in the landscape of lies (evidence of a buried treasure in an English Renaissance painting) or stones of treason (blackmail with the aim of returning parts of the Parthenon frieze from the British Museum). He also wrote a biography of Rudolf Nureyev , books on art trading such as the Sotheby’s auction house , art theft, art history, twins, psychological warfare, and books on general cultural history.

Since 1997 he has been a research fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University . He lives in London and France.

In 1983 he received the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain's Golden Dagger Award.

Works

Non-fiction
  • Psychology and Race, Penguin 1973 (Editor)
  • War on the Mind: the Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology, Basic Books and Hutchinson, London 1978
  • Twins- an uncanny relationship. An Investigation into the Strange Coincidences in the Lives of Separated Twins, Contemporary Books 1983
  • The Caravaggio Conspiracy: how five art dealers, four policemen, three picture restorers, two auction houses, and a journalist plotted to recover some of the world's most beautiful stolen paintings, Doubleday 1984 (also published as "Double Dealer" 1983)
  • Wisdom and Strength, the Biography of a Renaissance Masterpiece, Doubleday 1989, Hutchinson, 1990, (the painting of the same name by Paolo Veronese , today in the Frick Collection, and its owners over the years)
  • From Manet to Manhattan - the rise of the modern art market, Random House 1992
  • with Ada Petrova: Death of Hitler - the final words from Russia's secret archives, Cohen Books 1995
  • Sotheby's, Econ 1997 (Sotheby's - the inside story, Random House, Bloomsbury 1997)
  • Nurejew, Econ 1998 (Nurejew - a biography, London, Hodder and Stoughton 1994)
  • The smile of Medusa - the history of modern knowledge, Goldmann Taschenbuch, ISBN 978-3-442-15253-7 , Bertelsmann 2001 (A terrible beauty), also published as: The modern mind - an intellectual history of the 20th century
  • Ideas, Bertelsmann 2006 (Ideas - a history of thought and invention from Fire to Freud, Orion 2006)
  • with Cecilia Todeschini: The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities — From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums, Perseus Books, 2006, German Parthas 2006
  • The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century . Harper, 2010. ISBN 0060760222 . ( German  The German Genius: A Spiritual and Cultural History from Bach to Benedict XVI . C. Bertelsmann, 2010. ISBN 3570010856. )
  • The Age of Nothing: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God. Simon & Schuster, New York 2014, ISBN 1476754314 .
    • dt .: The age of nothing. A history of ideas and culture from Friedrich Nietzsche to Richard Dawkins. Bertelsmann, 2016, ISBN 978-3-570-10223-7 .
Detective novels
  • The Nazi's wife, Doubleday 1985
  • Treason in the Vatican, Econ 1988 (Crusade)
  • Landscape of Lies, Econ 1991 (Landscape of Lies 1989)
  • Stones of Treason, Econ 1994
  • The Honorable Family, Econ 1998 (Capo, London, Richard Cohen Books 1993)
  • The Sistine Auction, Econ 1999
  • Picasso's Secret, Econ 1999 (The Stalin Picasso, Richard Cohen Books 1997)
Novels
  • Nothing is an accident, Outskirts Press 2007

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Watson, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Watson, Peter Frank Patrick (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British art historian and crime writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Birmingham