Born in Glasgow in 1964, he was a Demy at Magdalen College and graduated with First Class Honours in 1985. After two years as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, he took up a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1989, subsequently moving to a Lectureship at Peterhouse.

His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1997), was a UK bestseller.

In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (Penguin) and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001 he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (Penguin) the fruit of a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England.

He is a regular contributor to television and radio, and has just completed a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, recently broadcast in the UK. His latest book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Penguin), has been a best-seller in both Britain and the U.S.

A prolific commentator on contemporary politics, he writes and reviews regularly for the British and American press. He is also an outstanding keynote speaker on international political trends.