Bettany Hughes is an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster.

She was born in 1967 in and brought up in west London, the daughter of actor Peter Hughes and the sister of cricketer and journalist Simon Hughes.

Hughes has written two critically acclaimed books on Ancient Greek subjects, Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore (2005) and The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (2010). The latter was a New York Times bestseller, Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 and a finalist for the Writer’s Guild Award.

Hughes has written and presented documentary films and series on both ancient and modern subjects for National Geographic, BBC, Discovery Channel, PBS, The History Channel and Channel 4. In July 2012, she began to co-present a series on ITV with Michael Buerk, Britain’s Secret Treasures.

She is a Tutor for Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education and a Research Fellow of King’s College London. She has also taught at Oxford and lectured at Cornell, Bristol, UCL, Maastricht, Utrecht and Manchester.