John Keay
John Stanley Melville Keay FRGS is an English journalist and author specialising in writing popular histories about India and the Far East, often with a particular focus on their colonisation and exploration by Europeans.
John Keay is the author of about 20 books, all factual, mostly historical, and largely to do with Asia, exploration or Scotland. His first book stayed in print for thirty years; many others have become classics. His combination of meticulous research, irreverent wit, powerful narrative and lively prose have invariably been complimented by both reviewers and readers.
UK-based and a full-time author since 1973, he also wrote and presented over 100 documentaries for BBC Radios 3 and 4 from 1975-95 and guest-lectured tour groups
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H.W. Crocker III
H.W. Crocker III is the bestselling author of the prize-winning comic novel The Old Limey and several books of military history, including Triumph, Robert E. Lee on Leadership, The Politically Incorrect Guide® to the Civil War, The Politically Incorrect Guide® to the British Empire, Yanks, and Don’t Tread on Me.
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His journalism has appeared in National Review, the American Spectator, the Washington Times, and many other outlets. Educated in England and California, Crocker lives on the site of a former Confederate encampment in Virginia. -
S.C.M. Paine
Sarah C. M. Paine is William S. Sims Professor of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College.
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Michel Danino
Michel Danino was born in France in 1956. At the age of 21, after four years of higher scientific studies, he decided to live in India, where he first took part in the English translation, editing and publication of books related to Sri Aurobindo and Mother. A student of Indian civilization, culture and history, he has lectured widely and published research papers in journals of archaeology and Indology. In 1996, he wrote a brief study of the Aryan problem in the Indian context, The Invasion That Never Was (2nd edition 2000), further enlarged a decade later in a French book (English version forthcoming). In 2010, he authored a comprehensive study of the Sarasvati River, The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati (Penguin India). Michel D
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Patrick Olivelle
Patrick Olivelle is Emeritus Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Julia Lovell
Julia Lovell is a British scholar, author, and translator whose non-fiction books focus on China.
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She is professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where her research has been focused principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building.
Lovell's books include The Politics of Cultural Capital: China's Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (University of Hawaii Press, 2006); The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC – AD 2000 (Atlantic Books, 2006); and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador, 2011).
She is also a literary translator; her translations include works by Lu Xun, Han -
William Dalrymple
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; it was also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.
In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. From the Holy Mountain, his acclaimed study of the demise of Christianity in its Middle Eastern homeland, was -
Michael Gannon
(1928-April, 10, 2017)
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Michael Gannon was a University of Florida history professor who was also a recognized expert on Florida history, particularly from its Spanish colonial founding through the Civil War. He spent most of his career in Florida.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes is an archaeologist, author and Honorary Fellow in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. Her critically acclaimed and bestselling first book KINDRED: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art is a deep dive into the 21st century science and understanding of these ancient relatives.
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Winner of the 2021 PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for history; awarded Book of the Year by Current Archaeology; selected as one of 2021's 100 Notable Books by The New York Times, a Book of the Year by The Sunday Times, Book of the Week by The Times and Book of the Day by The Guardian, KINDRED is being translated into 19 languages so far.
Alongside her academic expertise and consultancy work, Rebecca has ea -
Marc David Baer
Professor Baer earned his BA degree at Northwestern University and his PhD at the University of Chicago. Before joining LSE in 2013, Baer taught at Tulane University, New Orleans, and the University of California, Irvine.
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Professor Baer’s research focuses on the connected histories of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in European and Middle Eastern history, from the early modern era to the modern .
His first book, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford, 2008, Turkish translation, IV. Mehmet Döneminde Osmanlı Avrupasında İhtida ve Fetih, Hil, 2010), analyzes how Muslim proselytizers conceived and practiced converting other Muslims, as well as Christians and Jews to their interpretation of Islam. Honored b -
Jung Chang
Jung Chang (Chinese: 張戎) is a Chinese-British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China.
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Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, written with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005. -
Michael Wood
Librarian Note: There's more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Michael David Wood is an English historian & broadcaster. He's presented numerous tv documentary series. Library of Congress lists him as Michael Wood.
Wood was born in Moston, Manchester, & educated at Manchester Grammar School & Oriel College, Oxford. His special interest was Anglo-Saxon history. In the 70s Wood worked for the BBC in Manchester. He was 1st a reporter, then an assistant producer on current affairs programmes, before returning to his love of history with his 1981 series In Search of the Dark Ages for BBC2. This explored the lives of leaders of the period, including Boadicea, King Arthur, Offa, Alfred t -
Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor is a member of the Indian Parliament from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Kerala. He previously served as the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information and as the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs.
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He is also a prolific author, columnist, journalist and a human rights advocate.
He has served on the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also an adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva and a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University. He has also served as a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and the Advisory of the Indo-American Arts Council, the American India Foundat -
Paul Kriwaczek
Paul Kriwaczek was a British historian and television producer. In 1970 he joined the BBC full-time and wrote, produced and directed for twenty-five years. A former head of Central Asian Affairs at the BBC World Service, he was fluent in eight languages, including Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi and Nepalese.
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Daniel Yergin
Daniel Yergin is the author of the new bestseller The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World which has been hailed as “a fascinating saga” about the “quest for sustainable resources of energy,” and “the book you must read to understand the future of our economy and our way of life,” not to mention “necessary reading for C.E.O.’s, conservationists, lawmakers, generals, spies, tech geeks, thriller writers. . . and many others.”
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He received the Pulitzer Prize for The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil Money and Power, which became a number one New York Times best seller and has been translated into 17 languages.
Dr. Yergin is Vice Chairman of IHS and Founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and serves as CNBC’s Global En -
Charles Allen
Charles Allen is a British writer and historian. He was born in India, where several generations of his family served under the British Raj. His work focuses on India and South Asia in general. Allen's most notable work is Kipling Sahib, a biography of Rudyard Kipling. His most recent work, Ashoka: the Search for India's Lost Emperor, was published in February 2012.
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Selected works:
Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century (1975)
Raj: A Scrapbook of British India 1877–1947 (1977)
Tales from the Dark Continent: Images of British Colonial Africa in the Twentieth Century (1979)
A Mountain in Tibet: The Search for Mount Kailas and the Sources of the Great Rivers of India (1982)
Tales from the South China Seas: I -
Ezra F. Vogel
Ezra Feivel Vogel was an American sociologist who wrote prolifically on modern Japan, China, and Korea. He was Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
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Vogel was born to a family of Jewish immigrants in 1930 in Delaware, Ohio. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1950 and received his Ph.D. from the Department of Social Relations in 1958 from Harvard.
After two years of field work in Japan, Vogel worked as an assistant professor at Yale University from 1960 to 1961, but returned to Harvard for post-doctoral work on Chinese language and history. He was appointed as a lecturer in 1964, later becoming a tenured professor; he remained at Harvard until his retirement.
Vogel was involved with several research ce -
William Dalrymple
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; it was also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.
In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. From the Holy Mountain, his acclaimed study of the demise of Christianity in its Middle Eastern homeland, was -
Ramachandra Guha
Ramachandra Guha was born in Dehradun in 1958, and educated in Delhi and Calcutta. He has taught at the University of Oslo, Stanford, and Yale, and at the Indian Institute of Science. He has been a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and also served as the Indo-American Community Chair Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
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After a peripatetic academic career, with five jobs in ten years on three continents, Guha settled down to become a full-time writer based in Bangalore. His books cover a wide range of themes, including a global history of environmentalism, a biography of an anthropologist-activist, a social history of Indian cricket, and a social history of Himalayan peasants.
Guha’s books and essays hav -
R.H.P. Mason
Richard Mason graduated from Cambridge University. He received his Ph.D. from the Australian National University where he subsequently lectured on Japanese history as a member of the Faculty of Asian Studies for over thirty years. Dr. Mason is also the author of Japan's First General Election (Cambridge University Press, 1969). Now retired, he continues to live and work in Canberra.
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Joe Abercrombie
Joe Abercrombie was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Manchester University, where he studied psychology. He moved into television production before taking up a career as a freelance film editor. During a break between jobs he began writing The Blade Itself in 2002, completing it in 2004. It was published by Gollancz in 2006 and was followed by two other books in The First Law trilogy, Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings. He currently lives and works in London with his wife and daughter. In early 2008 Joe Abercrombie was one of the contributors to the BBC Worlds of Fantasy series, alongside other contributors such as Michael Moorcock, Terry Pratchett and China Mieville.
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Tony Joseph
Tony Joseph is an Indian journalist and former editor of Businessworld magazine. He is also the author of the best-selling book Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From (2018). Until 2018, he was also the chairman and co-founder of Mindworks Global Media Services. He is based in New Delhi. Joseph has been an editor and a journalist for over three decades and was, at various times, features editor of The Economic Times, associate editor of Business Standard and editor of Businessworld magazine (from 1998). His articles have appeared in Outlook India, Quartz, Live Mint and The Hindu.
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Early Indians is focused on four prehistoric migrations that shaped the demography of India, including the migrations after 2000 BC.
Joseph -
Marc David Baer
Professor Baer earned his BA degree at Northwestern University and his PhD at the University of Chicago. Before joining LSE in 2013, Baer taught at Tulane University, New Orleans, and the University of California, Irvine.
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Professor Baer’s research focuses on the connected histories of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in European and Middle Eastern history, from the early modern era to the modern .
His first book, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford, 2008, Turkish translation, IV. Mehmet Döneminde Osmanlı Avrupasında İhtida ve Fetih, Hil, 2010), analyzes how Muslim proselytizers conceived and practiced converting other Muslims, as well as Christians and Jews to their interpretation of Islam. Honored b -
Stephen R. Platt
Stephen R. Platt is an award-winning historian of China and the West whose newest book is The Raider (Knopf, 2025). His previous books include Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (Knopf, 2012), which won the Cundill History Prize, and Imperial Twilight (Knopf, 2018), which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and holds a PhD in History from Yale. He lives with his family in Northampton, MA.
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Luo Guanzhong
Luo Ben (c. 1330–1400), better known by his style name Luo Guanzhong (罗贯中) (Mandarin pronunciation: [lwɔ kwantʂʊŋ]), was a Chinese writer who lived during the Yuan Dynasty. He was also known by his pseudonym Huhai Sanren (Chinese: 湖海散人; pinyin: Húhǎi Sǎnrén; literally "Leisure Man of Lakes and Seas"). Luo was attributed with writing Romance of the Three Kingdoms and editing Water Margin, two of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.
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Christopher Clark
Sir Christopher Munro Clark FBA is an Australian historian living in the United Kingdom and Germany. He is the twenty-second Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. In 2015, he was knighted for his services to Anglo-German relations.
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Nick Holmes
Hello, I'm a British author, podcaster, and historian, and welcome to my series of books on the Fall Of The Roman Empire. My passion is Roman history. I've wandered among the ruins of the Roman Forum and wondered what happened to this great civilisation? I've stared into the dome of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and reflected on how the Roman Empire lasted for centuries after Rome itself was sacked, even when its capital moved to Constantinople. So, I've embarked on writing the full account of this momentous time.
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Immerse yourself in this incredible story. It may surprise you to find that those events so long ago are strangely relevant to our modern times, from the changing climate to religion, and from war to peace. Let us listen to the voices -
Richard M. Eaton
Richard Maxwell Eaton is a Professor of History at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, where he has taught since 1972. His research interests focus on the social and cultural history of pre-modern India (1000-1800), and especially on the range of historical interactions between Iran and India, and on Islam in South Asia.
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Professor Eaton has authored several significant monographs that have contributed substantially to the field. These include studies on the social roles of Sufis in the Indian sultanate of Bijapur (1300-1700), the growth of Islam in Bengal (1204-1760), the social history of the Deccan from 1300 to 1761, and the interplay between memory and art in the Deccan plateau between 1300 and 1600. His scholarly work encompasses a -
Stephen R. Platt
Stephen R. Platt is an award-winning historian of China and the West whose newest book is The Raider (Knopf, 2025). His previous books include Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (Knopf, 2012), which won the Cundill History Prize, and Imperial Twilight (Knopf, 2018), which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and holds a PhD in History from Yale. He lives with his family in Northampton, MA.
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R.H.P. Mason
Richard Mason graduated from Cambridge University. He received his Ph.D. from the Australian National University where he subsequently lectured on Japanese history as a member of the Faculty of Asian Studies for over thirty years. Dr. Mason is also the author of Japan's First General Election (Cambridge University Press, 1969). Now retired, he continues to live and work in Canberra.
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Bill Aitken
William McKay Aitken was a British-born Indian travel writer and mountain lover from Scotland. He was the author of a number of books about India, its mountains, rivers and its steam trains.
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Stewart N. Gordon
Stewart N. Gordon is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.
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Vince Cable
John Vincent "Vince" Cable is a British politician and Leader of the Liberal Democrats. He was the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills from 2010 to 2015 and the Member of Parliament for Twickenham from 1997 until losing his seat in the 2015 election. He regained his seat in the 2017 election and became leader of the Liberal Democrats soon after.
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Cable studied economics at the University of Cambridge and the University of Glasgow, before becoming an economic advisor to the Government of Kenya between 1966 and 1968 and to the Commonwealth Secretary-General in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1968 to 1974 he lectured in economics at Glasgow University. Later, he served as Chief Economist for Shell from 1995 to 1997. In the 1970s Cab -
Hugh Kennedy
NOTE: There is more than one author with this name on Goodreads.
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Hugh^Kennedy
Has studies Arabic at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies. Went on to read Arabic, Persian & History at Cambridge. Taught in the Department of Medieval History at St Andrews since 1972, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2000). -
Nicholas Jackson
Nicholas is an infectious disease scientist by training (MSc., DLSHTM., PhD), with more than 20 years' professional experience in the pharmaceutical industry working on vaccines. Recently, he has worked in R&D on several COVID-19 vaccines and advised several institutions and sovereign states on their vaccine development efforts. In his career, he has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers, reviews and professional articles. As a life-long student of Roman history, he has now uniquely combined his passion for Imperial Rome with his research acumen and writing expertise for the pharma industry to bring to life the gripping stories of ancient Rome.
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Sunil Khilnani
Sunil Khilnani is holder of the Avantha Chair and Director of the India Institute, which he established at King’s in 2011.
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Born in New Delhi, he grew up in India, Africa, and Europe. He was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he took a first in Social and Political Sciences, and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he gained his PhD in Social and Political Sciences.
Prior to becoming Director of the King’s India Institute he was, from 2001 to 2011, the Starr Foundation Professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington D.C., and Director of South Asia Studies at SAIS, a program that he established in 2002.
Sunil Khilnani was formerly Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, Univers -
Sima Qian
Sima Qian (Szu-ma Chien; 司馬遷 c. 145 or 135 BC – 86 BC) was a Chinese historian of the Han dynasty. He is considered the father of Chinese historiography for his work, the Records of the Grand Historian, a Jizhuanti-style (纪传体) general history of China, covering more than two thousand years from the Yellow Emperor to his time, during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han. Although he worked as the Court Astrologer (Chinese: 太史令; Tàishǐ Lìng), later generations refer to him as the Grand Historian (Chinese: 太史公; taishigong or tai-shih-kung) for his monumental work. (Wikipedia)
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