Dr David Boyd Haycock has worked as an academic at the Universities of Oxford and London, and as a curator at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.  He is now a freelance writer, lecturer and curator specializing in British cultural history of the early twentieth century.

He is the author of a number of books, including Paul Nash (Tate Publishing, 2002); A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (Old Street Publishing, 2009), which was short-listed by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain as best work of non-fiction, 2009; and I Am Spain: The Spanish Civil War and the Men and Women who went to Fight Fascism (Old Steet Publishing, 2012). He curated the exhibition ‘Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: A Crisis of Brilliance, 1908 to 1922’ at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in the summer of 2013. Art-Quake, 1910: The Manet and the Post-Impressionists Exhibition, his study of London's first exhibition of post-impressionist artists, was published in 2026 (Old Street). The Times described it as ‘a lucid study of the tensions between five artists divided by social status but united by the experience of conflict. . . Art history is rarely this fun.’