Ruth Brandon
Ruth Brandon, born in 1943, is a British journalist, historian and author. She was born in Luton, where her family ran a factory, and grew up in Edgware. Her grandparents were Jewish refugees from Russia. She attended North London Collegiate School and studied English and French at Girton College, Cambridge, then at a women’s college.
Brandon started as a trainee producer for the BBC, working in radio and television. She later became a freelance journalist and writer, producing many works of fiction and non-fiction.
Her best-known book is The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983). It was republished by Prometheus Books and argues against spiritualism by showing fraud in mediumship, influencing skeptics. Martin Gardner praised it for showing how easily intelligent people can be fooled by psychic frauds.
In the early 1980s, Brandon had a public dispute with paranormal writer Brian Inglis over the medium Daniel Dunglas Home in the New Scientist magazine.
Brandon lives in London with her husband, Philip Steadman, an art historian. Their daughter Lily was born in 1982.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 15:26 (CET).