Ben was born in London in 1974. He was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge where he read Social & Political Sciences. He graduated in 1996, taking a double First.

 

After an astonishingly brief “career” at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, Ben spent most of his twenties as a freelance portrait photographer for a diverse range of editorial and commercial clients.

 

As a photographer Ben worked with The Independent, The Times, The Sunday Times, Reader’s Digest, and Sunday Business, amongst many others, and has photographed a wealth of celebrities from Hugh Grant and Tony Blair, to Gordon Brown and Enoch Powell.

 

In 2002, Ben turned a Christmas card into his first book — Schott’s Original Miscellany — which within weeks was a bestseller. He has subsequently published a series of Miscellanies and Almanacs – and the book Schottenfreude – which together have sold some 2.5 million copies, in 21 languages (including Braille).

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In 2018, he published his first novel — Jeeves & The King of Clubs — an authorized homage to P. G. Wodehouse, which received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. The sequel — Jeeves & The Leap of Faith — was published in October 2020, to equal applause.

 

Ben has written for many of the great British and American titles including The Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times, The Spectator, Private Eye, Bloomberg Opinion and Playboy.

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Unusually, Ben designs and typesets virtually all of his work – as well offering design and narrative consultancy to a range of clients.

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He is married to the award-winning travel editor, Pavia Rosati; lives and works in London; and finds writing in the third-person awkward.

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Below is Anne Diamond’s December 2020 interview: