| Year | Author | Title | Ref. |
|---|
| 1956 | Alan Moorehead | Gallipoli | |
|---|
| 1957 | Lawrence Durrell | Bitter Lemons | |
|---|
| 1958 | John Betjeman | Collected Poems | |
|---|
| 1959 | Patrick Leigh Fermor | Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese | |
|---|
| 1960 | Andrew Young | Collected Poems | |
|---|
| 1961 | Jocelyn Baines | Joseph Conrad | |
|---|
| 1962 | Michael Howard | The Franco-Prussian War | |
|---|
| 1963 | Aileen Ward | John Keats: The Making of a Poet | [3][4] |
|---|
| 1964 | Ivan Morris | The World of the Shining Prince | |
|---|
| 1965 | George Painter | Marcel Proust | |
|---|
| 1966 | Nirad C. Chaudhuri | The Continent of Circe | [5] |
|---|
| 1967 | J. A. Baker | The Peregrine | [6] |
|---|
| 1968 | Roy Fuller | New Poems | |
|---|
| 1969 | John Gross | The Man of Letters | |
|---|
| 1970 | Enid McLeod | Charles of Orleans: Prince & Poet | |
|---|
| 1971 | Geoffrey Grigson | Discoveries of Bones and Stones | |
|---|
| 1972 | Quentin Bell | Virginia Woolf | |
|---|
| 1973 | Robin Lane Fox | Alexander the Great | |
|---|
| 1974 | Jon Stallworthy | Wilfred Owen | |
|---|
| 1975 | Seamus Heaney | North | |
|---|
| 1976 | Denis Mack Smith | Mussolini's Roman Empire | |
|---|
| 1977 | E. R. Dodds | Missing Persons | |
|---|
| 1978 | Mark Girouard | Life in the English Country House | |
|---|
| 1979 | Geoffrey Hill | Tenebrae | |
|---|
| 1980 | Robert Bernard Martin | Tennyson, The Unquiet Heart | |
|---|
| 1981 | Victoria Glendinning | Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among the Lions | |
|---|
| 1982 | Richard Ellmann | James Joyce | |
|---|
| 1983 | Peter Porter | Collected Poems | |
|---|
| 1984 | Hilary Spurling | Ivy When Young: The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884-1919 | |
|---|
| 1985 | Ann Thwaite | Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape,1849,1928 | |
|---|
| 1986 | Alan Crawford | C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer, and Romantic Socialist | |
|---|
| 1987 | Robert Hughes | The Fatal Shore | |
|---|
| 1988 | Humphrey Carpenter | A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound | |
|---|
| 1989 | Ian Gibson | Federico Garcia Lorca | |
|---|
| 1990 | Hugh Cecil andMirabel Cecil | Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly Maccarthy: A Biography | |
|---|
| 1991 | Ray Monk | Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius | |
|---|
| 1992 | Peter Hennessy | Never Again: Britain, 1945-1951 | |
|---|
| 1993 | John Keegan | A History of Warfare | |
|---|
| 1994 | David Gilmour | Curzon: Imperial Statesman | |
|---|
| 1995 | Gitta Sereny | Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth | |
|---|
| 1996 | Diarmaid MacCulloch | Thomas Cranmer: A Life | |
|---|
| 1997 | James Buchan | Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money | |
|---|
| 1998 | Richard Holmes | Coleridge: Darker Reflections | |
|---|
| 1999 | Adam Hochschild | King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa | |
|---|
| 2000 | Robert Skidelsky | John Maynard Keynes | |
|---|
| 2001 | Margaret MacMillan | Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War | [7] |
|---|
| 2002 | Jane Ridley | The Architect and His Wife | [8] |
|---|
| 2003 | Anne Applebaum | Gulag: A History | [9] |
|---|
| 2004 | Mark Mazower | Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 | [10] |
|---|
| 2005 | Maya Jasanoff | Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting on the Eastern Frontiers of the British Empire | [11] |
|---|
| 2006 | William Dalrymple | The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 | [12] |
|---|
| 2007 | Graham Robb | The Discovery of France | |
|---|
| 2008 | Kai Bird andMartin J. Sherwin | American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer | [13] |
|---|
| 2009 | Robert Service | Trotsky: A Biography | [14] |
|---|
| 2010 | Sarah Bakewell | How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer | [15] |
|---|
| 2011 | Robert Douglas-Fairhurst | Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist | [16] |
|---|
| 2012 | Sue Prideaux | Strindberg: A Life | [17][18] |
|---|
| 2013 | Lucy Hughes-Hallett | The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War | [19] |
|---|
| 2014 | Patrick McGuinness | Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory | |
|---|
| 2015 | Ian Bostridge | Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession | [20][21] |
|---|
| 2016 | Christopher de Hamel | Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts | [22][23] |
|---|
| 2017 | Anne Applebaum | Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine | [24][25] |
|---|
| 2018 | Julian Jackson | A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles De Gaulle | [26] |
|---|
| 2019 | John Barton | A History of the Bible | [27][28] |
|---|
| 2020 | Judith Herrin | Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Empire | [29][30] |
|---|
| 2021 | Mark Mazower | The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe | [31] |
|---|
| 2022 | Anna Keay | The Restless Republic: Britain without a Crown | [32][33] |
|---|
| 2023 | Julian Jackson | France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain | [34] |
|---|
| 2024 | Sue Prideaux | Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin | [35] |
|---|