2020 Winner Ravenna: Crucible of Europe by Judith Herrin
Shortlist Himalaya: A Human History by Ed Douglas Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca by Ferdinand Mount A Dominant Character: JBS Haldane by Samanth Subramanian
2019 Winner A History of the Bible by John Barton Shortlist The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons by Laura Cumming The Europeans by Orlando Figes Margaret Thatcher: Volume 3: Herself Alone by Charles Moore
2018 Winner De Gaulle by Julian Jackson
Shortlist The King and the Catholics by Antonia Fraser Thomas Cromwell by Diarmaid MacCulloch In Byron's Wake by Miranda Seymour The Marshall Plan by Benn Steil
2017 Winner Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum
Shortlist The Victorious Century by David Cannadine David Jones by Thomas Dilworth The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova
2016 Winner Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel
2015 Winner Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge
Shortlist Charlotte Bronte by Claire Harman Agents of Empire by Noel Malcolm The Tears of the Rajas by Ferdinand Mount The Poet’s Tale by Paul Strohm
Winners 2014 Other People’s Countries: A Journey into Memory by Patrick McGuinness
2013 The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
2012 Strindberg - A Life by Sue Prideaux
2011 Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
2010 How to live: A life of Montaigne in twenty questions and one attempt at an answer by Sarah Bakewell
2009 Trotsky by Robert Service
2008 American Prometheus by Kai Bird & Martin J Sherwin
2007 The Discovery of France by Graham Robb
2006 The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple
2005 Edge of Empire by Maya Jasanoff
2004 Salonica: City of Ghosts by Mark Mazower
2003 Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps by Anne Applebaum
2002 The Architect and his Wife: Edwin Lutyens by Jane Ridley
2001 Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War by Margaret Macmillan
2000 John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920 by Robert Skidelsky
1999 King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
1998 Coleridge: Darker Reflections by Richard Holmes
1997 Frozen Desire by James Buchan
1996 Thomas Cranmer: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch
1995 Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny
1994 Curzon by David Gilmour
1993 A History of Warfare by John Keegan
1992 Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 by Peter Hennessy
1991 Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk
1990 Clever Hearts by Hugh & Mirabel Cecil
1989 Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson
1988 The Life of Ezra Pound by Humphrey Carpenter
1987 The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
1986 CR Ashbee by Alan Crawford
1985 Edmund Gosse by Ann Thwaite
1984 Ivy Compton-Burnett by Hilary Spurling
1983 Collected Poems by Peter Porter
1982 James Joyce by Richard Ellmann
1981 Edith Sitwell: Unicorn Among Lions by Victoria Glendinning
1980 Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart by Robert Bernard Martin
1979 Tenebrae by Geoffrey Hill
1978 Life in the English Country House by Mark Girouard
1977 Missing Persons by ER Dodds
1976 Mussolini’s Roman Empire by Denis Mack Smith
1975 North by Seamus Heaney
1974 Wilfred Owen by Jon Stallworthy
1973 Alexander The Great by Robin Lane Fox
1972 Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell
1971 Discoveries of Bones and Stones by Geoffrey Grigson
1970 Charles of Orleans by Enid McLeod
1969 The Man of Letters by John Gross
1968 New Poems by Roy Fuller
1967 The Peregrine by JA Baker
1966 The Continent of Circe by Nirad C Chaudhuri
1965 Marcel Proust by George Painter
1964 The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris
1963 John Keats: The Making of a Poet by Aileen Ward