Dr David Runciman is Professor in Political Thought in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at Cambridge University.  His special areas of interest are the history of ideas and the connection between political theory and contemporary politics.  He is a recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship award to work on a project about how democracies cope with disasters.

He is the author of The Politics of Good Intentions (Princeton, 2006) The Mask of Power: Politics and Hypocrisy from Hobbes to Orwell (Princeton, 2008) and his latest book The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War 1 to the Present (Princeton 2013)

He writes widely about politics in a number of different national publications, including the Financial Times and is a regular reviewer for 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.