The official website of writer

Welcome!

I love history and enjoy writing.  My areas of focus have been varied and yet always with a desire to ‘upend’ established opinion and search for greater understanding of issues past and present.    My first regional study was South Africa at a time when the apartheid regime was yet to be dismantled, resulting in the publication of my first article in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1977.  From Africa,  my attention shifted to South Asia.  Benazir Bhutto was a close friend at Oxford, and when her father, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was sentenced to death for conspiracy to murder a political opponent in 1978, I put my fledging ambition to write professionally into a higher gear by travelling to Islamabad. The fruits of my endeavours were several articles in The Spectator and my first book, Bhutto: Trial and Execution. 

For over forty years, I’ve remained dedicated to learning more about South Asian politics, both as a historian and journalist, travelling widely in the region. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 provided the inspiration for another book, Every Rock, Every Hill: The Plain Tale of the North-West Frontier and Afghanistan (1984),   revised as Afghan Frontier: Feuding and Fighting in Central Asia (2003) and as Afghan Frontier: At the Crossroads of Conflict (2010).  My other main area of research has been the dispute over  the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, about which I have written articles and books  (Kashmir in the Crossfire (1996) and Kashmir  in Conflict (2000, 2002, 2010 and 2021).)  I also worked as an independent broadcaster   for the BBC World Service in London and New York during the 1980s and 1990s, covering numerous other stories, ranging from a feature on British sculptor, Henry Moore to a series on ‘Women of the French Revolution’.

Wavell: Soldier and Statesman (2006) - a biography of Field Marshal Earl Wavell - combines my lifelong interest in military history with my knowledge of South Asia. Witness to History: the life of John Wheeler-Bennett (2012) describes the life of a military historian and royal biographer. The official history of The Black Watch in two volumes: The Highland Furies, The Black Watch 1739-1899, (2012) and The Black Watch, Fighting in the Front Line 1899-2006 (2017), both a Foreword by HRH the Prince of Wales, took nearly a decade to research and write. I have also contributed to The Black Watch and the Great War (2020), Afghanistan Revealed (2011 & 2013), and have written Forewords for Anna Suvorova's book: Benazir Bhutto: A Multidimensional Portrait (2015) and Farhana Qazi's Secrets of the Kashmir Valley (2016). In 2018 I edited my father's memoirs, With the Royal Navy in War and Peace, O'er the Dark Blue Sea. My 'lockdown' project was writing my memoir of Benazir Bhutto, The Fragrance of Tears, my friendship with Benazir Bhutto (2020, Urdu edition 2024). My latest publication is the story of 'great deeds in little ships': The Rescue Ships and the Convoys, Saving Lives in World War Two (2024) - a revised and expanded edition of a book my father published in 1968!