Simon David Jenkins is a British author, a newspaper columnist and editor. He was editor of the Evening Standard from 1976 to 1978 and of The Times from 1990 to 1992.
Jenkins chaired the National Trust from 2008 to 2014. He currently writes columns for The Guardian.
Jenkins has written several books on the politics, history and architecture of England, including England’s Thousand Best Churches and England’s Thousand Best Houses. In his 2011 book A Short History of England, he argued that the British Empire “was a remarkable institution that dismantled itself in good order”.
In 2022, Jenkins’s book, The Celts: A Sceptical History, stoked some controversy on account of his incredulous view of the Celts as a distinct cultural entity. The release of the work was met with a number of hostile reviews from specialists in Celtic studies, with these critics of the book alleging factual errors in the work as well as of the misrepresentation of sources.
