Robert Baldock started working at Yale University Press in London as a history editor in 1985. After serving as editorial director of the publisher’s humanities division, and deputy m.d.,   he was promoted to Managing Director in 2004. His authors on the biography, history, politics, music and religion lists have included Roy Porter, Richard Evans and Diarmuid MacCulloch. Prior to Yale he worked at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and the Harvester Press.

We talk here about his predecessor John Nicol, a brilliant editor and designer who developed Yale’s art and architecture list, Nicol’s triumph Life in the English Country House; about Yale’s partnerships with the world’s great galleries and museums, its hands-on approach to production, E.H.Gombrich’s A Little History of the World (400,000 copies sold, and counting), Strawberry Hill and the Lewis Walpole Library in Connecticut, the Yale series of Younger Poets, the Annals of Communism series, and architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous guides.