Matthew Sweet is co-writer, with Mark Gatiss, of the TV detective series, Bookish. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians (Faber, 2001), Shepperton Babylon (Faber, 2005), The West End Front (Faber, 2011) and Operation Chaos (Picador 2018). His novel, The New Forest Murders was published in 2025.

Matthew presents Free Thinking on BBC Radio 4. His 25 years of broadcasting include 12 years of Sound of Cinema (Radio 3), five series of The Philosophers Arms (Radio 4) and 1922: The Birth of Now, a ten-part history of modernism (Radio 4). He is a Public Humanities Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.