David Runciman in Reader in Political Thought at Cambridge University . His special areas of interest are the history of ideas and the connection between political theory and contemporary politics.  He is the author of The Politics of Good Intentions (Princeton, 2006) and his latest book The Mask of Power: Politics and Hypocrisy from Hobbes to Orwell (Princeton, 2008).  He writes widely about politics in a number of different national publications, including the Financial Times and the London Review of Books. He has also written extensively about the politics and finances of sport.  In 2007 he was short-listed for the David Watt Prize for political journalism.

He has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to work on a project about how democracies cope with disasters.