Ian Bostridge

Ian Charles Bostridge CBE (born 25 December 1964) is an English tenor, well known for his performances as an opera and lieder singer.

Bostridge was born in London, the son of Leslie Bostridge and Lillian (née Clark). His father was a chartered surveyor. Bostridge is the great-grandson of the Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper from the early twentieth century, John "Tiny" Joyce.

He was a Queen's scholar at Westminster School. He attended St John's College, Oxford, where he secured a First in modern history and St John's College, Cambridge, where he received an M.Phil in the history and philosophy of science. He was awarded his D.Phil from Oxford in 1990, on the significance of witchcraft in English public life from 1650 to 1750, supervised by Keith Thomas. He worked in television current affairs and documentaries for two years in London before becoming a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, teaching political theory and eighteenth-century British history. He became a full-time singer in 1995, aged 30.His book Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650–1750 was published as an Oxford Historical Monograph in 1997. This – "the most sophisticated and original of all recent histories of early modern demonology" according to Professor Stuart Clark ("Witchcraft and Magic in Europe" volume 4, p139, 2002, – has been an influential work in the study of the pre-Enlightenment. It "achiev that rarest of feats in the scholarly world: taking a well-worn subject and ensuring that it will never be looked at in quite the same way again" (Noel Malcolm, TLS). In 1991 he won the National Federation of Music Societies Award and from 1992 received support from the Young Concert Artists Trust.