Stephen Bernard

Stephen Bernard grew up during the militant tendency in Liverpool, then in rural Dorset and small-town Sussex, before studying at Christ Church and Brasenose Colleges, Oxford, and becoming a fellow of University College, the oldest college in the English speaking world.

His prize-winning editions of manuscript letters by poets, playwrights, critics, essayists, and publishers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show the white heat of the crucible at the creation of English literature and its contested canon, and how at its centre there was a prostitute muse.

His memoir Paper Cuts discusses the severe sustained clerical child sexual abuse he experienced, the consequent mental illness, and experimental ketamine treatment, alongside his refuge in scholarship and friendship. He was later a Core Participant at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Historical Society, and the Higher Education Academy.