Gyles Brandreth

Gyles Brandreth is a writer, broadcaster, actor, former MP and Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, now Chancellor of the University of Chester and one of Britain’s most sought-after award ceremony hosts and after-dinner speakers. A star of Celebrity Gogglebox, a veteran of QI and Have I Got News For You, a reporter on The One Show, a presenter on Pointless, a regular on This Morning, and since the 1980s one of the mainstays of Just a Minute on BBC Radio 4. His most recent book Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait was an immediate Sunday Times No 1 bestseller. His many other books include an acclaimed childhood memoir Odd Boy Out, as well as nine detective novels, the bestselling The 7 Secrets of Happiness and an anthology of poetry to learn by heart, Dancing by the Light of the Moon.

Brandreth has been a devotee of Lewis Carroll since he saw a production of Through the Looking-Glass when he was seven. In the 1970s he created a one-man Lewis Carroll stage show and TV series for the entertainer Cyril Fletcher. In the 1980s he devised the Alice in Wonderland board game for the makers of Scrabble. More recently, with Susannah Pearse, he created the musical Wonderland about Charles Dodgson and his friendship with the actress Isa Bowman. In 2023, with descendants of the Dodgson family and the great-grandchildren of Alice Liddell (the original Alice), he unveiled a plaque at Folly Bridge in Oxford, on the bank of the river Isis, commemorating the boat trip that took place on ‘the golden afternoon’ of 4 July 1862 when the story of Alice’s adventures was told for the first time.