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Rosalind Miles

Rosalind Miles lives many lives in one. Her varied careers as historian, critic, novelist, journalist, broadcaster, traveller, lecturer, magistrate, and social activist are outlined below.


Author, Author!

Rosalind Miles is the award-winning author of 24 books of fiction and non-fiction, including history, criticism and social commentary. Her historical novels featuring celebrated queens of the British Isles have been internationally acclaimed, most notably I, Elizabeth, the story of Queen Elizabeth I, recreating the life and times of the Tudor Queen. 

Her later works, the Camelot novels based on the Celtic queens of the Arthurian saga, Guenevere and Isolde, have also appeared on best-seller lists in Britain, the US and elsewhere. 

Rosalind’s non-fiction publications include literary criticism and social commentary on leadership and power, women and work, and masculinity and sex. Among them The Women’s History of the World, published in America as Who Cooked The Last Supper? received outstanding reviews and has become a classic text which has been translated into over 40 different languages, most recently Romanian, Chinese and Korean. 

This and other non-fiction titles have been shortlisted for the Philippa Fawcett Award, and nominated for the James Tait Black and Whitbread literary awards. She has also published two books on women and war, written with the No 1# best-selling military historian Robin Cross, Hell Hath No Fury: True Stories of Woman at War from Antiquity to Iraq, and Warrior Women: Three Thousand Years of Courage and Heroism. 

As both novelist and critic, Rosalind has appeared at the Los Angeles International Book Fair, the Gothenburg Book Festival, the London Daily Telegraph Book Festival, the Cheltenham Festival, the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Dartington Hall Festival, and many more. She led a literary festival in Banff, Canada, with the South American Whitbread-Award-winning novelist, Alberto Manguel.

Scribble, Scribble

As a journalist, Rosalind's work has appeared at leader level in all the major British newspapers and in overseas publications like the Washington Post, Australia Today, Canada National Post, Saturday Night etc. She is a founder contributor of The Literary Review, Working Woman UK, and Prospect magazine. 

In the magazine world she is among the longest-serving senior contributing editors to Cosmopolitan in the UK, and has written for Elle, New Woman, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Journal and many more. She is a noted commentator on the British Royal Family and the history of the monarchy in the UK. 

Rosalind also became the London-based Managing Editor for the East-West fashion and current affairs magazine Libas, based in the Indian subcontinent, and Osrati magazine, the women’s voice of the Arabian peninsula.

 Foreign assignments have taken her to remote corners of Europe, America, Indonesia, the West Indies, Africa, Australia, Mexico and the Arab world. She has twice been received in private audience by the Sultan of Oman, and was invited to attend the State visit of His Royal Highness Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, to the Sultanate. 

And Another Thing - ! radio and tv 

Rosalind began her broadcasting career on the BBC in a Leap Year edition of R4’s Start the Week, explaining why royal protocol forced Queen Victoria to propose to Prince Albert, rather than the other way round. 

Then followed Stop The Week with Robert Robinson, Laurie Taylor, and Ann Leslie, and appearances on Woman’s Hour, the World Service, Night Waves, and many more. 

On BBC R4’s premier political debate programme Any Questions, she has jousted with British politicians Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Major, Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Lord “Gang of Four” Owen, among others. 

On BBC TV’s sister programme, Question Time, Rosalind has appeared with a series of UK luminaries, including Peter Mandelson, Lord Geoffrey Howe, Max Hastings, Jeffery Archer and Paul (now Lord) Boateng. 

She has presented her own radio and tv programmes on the British judiciary, Judge for Yourself, with the Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Mackay; on the British class system, Not In Front Of The Servants; on the history of child care, What Shall We Do With the Children?; and a behind the scenes story of the US exotic male dancing troupe, the Chippendales. 

In the UK, Rosalind appeared on ITV’s The Monarchy Debate, one of Britain's largest ever live broadcasts with an estimated 16m viewers. She became a five times national champion of BBC R4’s legendary Round Britain Quiz, partnered first by historian Lady Antonia Fraser and now by the CEO of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Stephen Maddock. Worldwide, Rosalind has appeared on CNN, CBS, PBS, WNBC, WBS, RTE, and countless local tv and radio stations everywhere. 

She has addressed a variety of meetings and assemblies from the Oxford and Cambridge Union Debating Societies and the European Parliament at Strasbourg, to Women's Institutes around her home in Warwickshire, most notably Shakespeare's Stratford upon Avon.

 

Just Do It

Rosalind’s involvement in local issues from her schooldays led to her appointment as a magistrate in Warwickshire at the age of 26, the youngest magistrate in the UK at the time. She initiated and ran the Adult Literacy Scheme in Coventry, which dealt with many hundreds who had left school unable to read and write, and served as a magistrate in Coventry for ten years, adjudicating and chairing both civil and criminal cases, and rising to the level of Crown Court. 

In the business world, Rosalind set up and ran the Coventry Centre to work with the Coventry Business School on returning women to the work force after a career break for childcare, a unit which dealt with almost 1000 women in its first two years. 

Rosalind later became a patron of the multi-ethnic Coventry Enterprise Development Agency set up to develop female entrepreneurs large and small, and of the UK-wide Families at Work, which lobbies government and other agencies for improved working conditions and a better work-life balance for all.

Rosalind has since worked with a range of companies to interpret the changing work environment and to communicate evolving policies on diversity issues, women into leadership and women's interests worldwide. 

Consultancies include national and international companies and financial institutions such as Citibank, NatWest, Midland Montagu PLC, Hill Samuel PLC, British Midland Airways, Focus International, Hamish Hamilton, Methuen Ltd, and Barclays Bank. For the Industrial Society, she created and directed management programmes for companies like Honeywell Systems on the industrial legislation and its implications for human resource management, and ran a number of programmes for the IT's Pepperell Unit concentrating on the female resource. 

In the public sector, she served on the Lord Chancellor’s consultative committee on Women, The Family and Divorce and also worked with other government agencies, in particular helping to articulate policy on the government initiative, Women Into Science and Engineering, under the direction of Baroness Platt of Writtle. 

For the National and Provincial Building Society, she formulated and directed a strategy for marketing financial products to the female consumer. 

For the Al-Marzouk Printing and Publishing Corporation, a Kuwait-based company with international interests in finance, real estate, and printing, Rosalind directed the London publishing operation, a position of particular significance during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. 

Engaged by Libas International, an East-West consortium with interests in manufacture, retailing, communications and publishing, she was a key member of the small team launching the company's business in Europe, resulting in the successful establishment of a London fashion house, a glossy lifestyle publication and the expansion of the original textile business into an international operation.

Conferences and chairmanships include:
- EU Conference, Brussels, 'Women, the Future', keynote speaker
- British Gas, 3-day conference, conference leader
- Imperial College, London, 'Industry Matters', speaker
- St George's House Conference, Windsor Castle
- Arab-British Chamber of Commerce, DTI seminar
- Maison des Femmes, Paris, 'Women on the Move', 
keynote speaker and panellist
- Crime Commission of Atlanta, Georgia, 'Tomorrow's World', where she received an award 
- the CBI, the TEC, the Rowntree Association, the DTI and the EC. 
Moving to work in America, Rosalind was deemed an Alien of Extraordinary Ability by the US Department of State.

Education

Starting life as a Mixed Infant in Shakespeare's Warwickshire, Rosalind was flown up to the academic hothouse of King Edward VI High School for Girls, Edgbaston, at the age of ten, and from there to read English at Oxford University, where she won the Eleanor Rooke Memorial Prize, the Principal’s Prize of St Hilda’s College and a State Studentship Award. 

She subsequently studied at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, where she was awarded an MA and a Ph.D, and at the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester, where she collected her fifth degree, a starred MA*, the only Distinction to be awarded in the history of the programme. 

Since then, Rosalind has taught and lectured at the universities of London, Birmingham and Coventry in the UK, at City University of New York; the Universities of Marburg and Duisberg in Germany, and Georgetown and Austin, Texas in the USA, among others. Before leaving academe to pursue writing and consultancy full time, she was the deputy Head of the Media Centre at Coventry University. 

A long-serving member of the Council for National Academic Awards, she became an Honorary Fellow of Rutherford College, University of Kent and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

In private life …

Born in Warwickshire, Rosalind is the youngest of three sisters and had a happy and lucky childhood, surviving a spell in an iron lung during an attack of polio at the age of four. Now the mother of two grown-up children, Rosalind is married to a fellow writer and Oxford scholar, the historian Robin Cross, and lives in Kent, in a house once owned by Peter Greenstreet, the Elizabethan ancestor of Casablanca actor Sidney Greenstreet, before moving to a Hertfordshire village outside London recorded in the Domesday book.

She is a founder member of the International Women's Forum and of the Women's Equality Party in the UK, becoming one of the first women members of the prestigious Reform Club in London. A keen amateur horsewoman, Rosalind is also a one-time Lotus owner and performance car enthusiast, and has taken part in time trials at Silverstone race track, UK. 

Rosalind in brief

- author of 24 books of fiction and non-fiction.
- winner of the Network Award for outstanding achievement in the field of writing for women.
- designated an Alien of Extraordinary Ability by the US Department of State.
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
- Honorary Fellow of the University of Kent.
- founder contributor of The Literary Review, Working Woman UK, and Prospect Magazine.
- The Women's History of the World awarded the non-fiction prize for the Best Foreign Title at the prestigious Gothenburg Book Fair, Sweden: voted Best Book in its field by the American Historical Association: and listed among the top 10 best women’s titles of the London Book Fair.
- I, Elizabeth and the Camelot novels widely acclaimed, appearing on best seller lists.

And finally

In a professional life that has included international authorship, business, education, the communications industry and the law, Rosalind remains more committed than ever to encouraging women and men to realise their potential and to build a better society with human rights for women worldwide and co-operation at every level between women and men.

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