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The Many Faces of Truth: History, Identity, and Perspective

On Christmas Eve 2025, I appeared as a witness on BBC’s Moral Maze – and the subject was ‘truth’. Which got me thinking about how as historians and writers we aim for truth, but that doesn’t mean what we come up with is the only truth, or the only truth that matters. The relativity of truth comes from our unique perspective on the world, and our place in it. Which means that to some extent truth has always been political –because those perspectives and places are political.

Truth and relativity is central, too, of my book The Face that will be published by Allen Lane in the UK on 26 February (June in the US and by Hachette).

The Face: A Cultural History explores how humans have interpreted faces throughout history and how they’ve shaped our ideas about identity, morality, and social hierarchy. It starts with the recognition that the face is the only part of the body where all our senses come together –and it has a history.

Today, the face is a foundational marker of who we are—from unlocking our phones with facial recognition to having our faces stamped in our passports. In the book, I chart how we have ended up here, for it isn’t a natural or inevitable position.

New technologies and cultural innovations have transformed our conception of selfhood over time: from the growth of portraiture in the Renaissance and the mass production of mirrors and photography in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first century developments like digital avatars and face transplants.

Drawing on research, interviews, and personal narratives – including my own experience living with prosopagnosia (face blindness) – I probe beneath the surface to ask what our faces really say about us.

The first review of The Face, by art historian Katy Hessel in the Sunday Times, describes the book as ‘equal parts gripping and scholarly, The Face is a timely book that gets to the heart of contemporary society’. You can read Katy’s full review here.

I have a number of articles and media appearances scheduled as the publication date draws near, and I will share those here. In the meantime, why not check out this Guardian article I wrote on the 20th anniversary of face transplants.