Harry Mount

Henry Francis Mount (born 1971) is a British author and journalist who is editor of The Oldie magazine and a frequent contributor to the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph.

Harry Mount was born in 1971.

His father, Sir Ferdinand Mount, Bt, FRSL, is also a journalist, and was an advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

One of his second cousins is the former British prime minister David Cameron.

Mount was educated at the North Bridge House School in London, followed by Westminster School, where he was an Honorary Scholar.

He then read Ancient and Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with a first.

At Oxford he was a member of the Bullingdon Club.

Mount pursued postgraduate studies in Architectural History at the Courtauld Institute, receiving an additional MA degree; he then qualified as a barrister, but failed to secure a tenancy in chambers following his pupillage.

He also briefly worked as a banker.

Harry Mount is editor of The Oldie, a British monthly magazine founded in 1992 by Richard Ingrams.

Mount has written extensively for The Spectator since 2002, and for the Evening Standard since 2012.

In 2022, Mount was appointed an Independent Member of the House of Lords Appointments Commission during Boris Johnson's final days in office.

The appointment was criticised by Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner, who called it "a display of pure arrogance by Boris Johnson, putting his own leading crony in charge of stopping cronyism in parliament".

As a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford, Mount enjoyed a certain notoriety after being rolled down a hill in a portable toilet.

"It was like coming out of Dracula's coffin", he told

After Mount wrote in The Spectator (2004) lamenting the supposed demise of Classics teaching in the UK, and dismissing the Cambridge Latin Course, The Spectator published a riposte from the Dean of Wadham, James Morwood, saying: "His denunciation of the Cambridge Latin Course as 'the evil Latin-for-idiots school textbooks' is blind to the fact that it was this very course which rescued Latin from an apparently terminal decline in the 1960s."

Also in 2004, he attracted some mild comment for refusing to review David Mitchell's widely acclaimed Cloud Atlas for The Sunday Telegraph because he could not finish it, finding it "unreadable".

The New Yorker in 2007.

The Classical theme recurred in 2007 with the publication of Mount's best-seller, Amo, Amas, Amat ... and All That.

Although this book repeated his ridicule of the education system, it was his exposure of the elitist implications of the study of Latin which “caused a measure of class controversy in the U.K."

In June 2013, Bloomsbury published The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, edited and introduced by Mount.

Mount also edited a collection of Auberon Waugh's journalism entitled Closing the Circle.

Ingrams was succeeded in 2014 by Alexander Chancellor, and Mount took over after Chancellor's death in 2017.

Mount has worked as a leader writer and a New York correspondent for The Daily Telegraph.

He previously had a regular column at the same paper.

"Class war with classicists" was the headline in Spectator Australia after Mount wrote a Telegraph article in 2015 saying classics exams had been dumbed down.

Mount detailed the abuse he received, including: "A classics student at King’s College London called me an 'antediluvian ape'. A classics teacher at Durham Sixth Form Centre predicted my next book would be 'bowel-achingly derivative'."

Mount fought back with: "The classics trolls instantly associate any dumbing down suggestions with far-right fogeyish snobbishness."

Mount lives in Kentish Town, north London.

Mount is the author of several books: