Profesor Sir Michael Howard, CH., CBE., MC, D.Litt., FBA. was born in 1922 and educated at Wellington and Christ Church Oxford. He has written and edited some twenty works. His first major work, THE FRANCO PRUSSIAN WAR (1961) was awarded the Duff Cooper prize.

His second, Volume IV in the Grand Strategy series of THE OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1972) received the first Wolfson Award for History. Of his shorter works, WAR IN EUROPEAN HISTORY (1976) has been translated into sixteen languages and THE INVENTION OF PEACE (2000) received the Political Book Prize from the Freidrich Ebert Stiftung in Berlin. He was joint translator and editor (with Professor Peter Paret) of CLAUSEWITZ ON WAR (1976), for which he received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for Military History.

He has also received the Chesney Gold Medal from the Royal United Services Institute, the NAT Atlantic Award, and the Paul Kitze Award from the US Center for Naval Analysis. He is President Emeritus of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, of which he was a joint founder.

He has held Chairs at King's College London (where he established the Liddell Hart Center for Military Archives and is commemorated by a named Reading Room and a portrait by Anthony Palliser); Stanford; Yale; and Oxford University, where he held the Regius Chair of Modern History from 1980-1989. He now lives in West Berkshire where he continues to write, garden, travel and listen to music.

Not since A.L. Rowse published his memoir "On Historians", has such an exquisite witty and perceptive memoir been published by a celebrated historian.

In many ways, Sir Michael is an establishment figure (knighthood, Order of Merit) but his influence of the way we live and think has been remarkable. Awarded the Military Cross in the Second World War, he recounts how between battles he befriended the young film director Franco Zefirelli. His account of beating the Germans out of Italy with Bishop Simon Phipps and the ballet critic Richard Buckle is hilarious.

Back in Oxford after the war he gives the reader delicious insight into the backbiting of academic life, including some perceptive portraits of Hugh Trevor Roper, Keith Thomas and A.L. Rowse. Howard had a major influence on the strategic and defence policy of the country and first made his name as a military historian. Eventually he pipped many more obvious candidates to the post to become Regius Professor of History because he claims he was the only candidate that the Queen had heard of (as the name indicates it is a Royal Appointment).

Sir Michael has been substantially responsible for the burgeoning of First World War studies, its history and its literature in schools and universities. This is a short memoir of exquisite charm, which gives special insight into the history of Britain in the post war years.