David Cairns has been chief music critic of the Sunday Times and music critic and arts editor of the Spectator. He has also written for the Evening Standard, the Financial Times and the New Statesman. He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, a visiting scholar at the Getty Center in Santa Monica, and a visiting fellow of Merton College, Oxford. His two-volume biography of Berlioz won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year and the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize.