Hugh Thomas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other people named Hugh Thomas see Hugh Thomas (disambiguation).
Hugh Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton (born October 21, 1931 in Windsor), is a British historian.
Thomas was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset before taking a BA in 1953 at Queens' College, Cambridge. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.
His 1961 book The Spanish Civil War won the Somerset Maugham Award for 1962. A significantly revised and enlarged third edition was released in 1977. Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (1971) is a book of over 1,500 pages tracing the history of Cuba from Spanish colonial times until the Castro revolution. Thomas spent 10 years researching the contents of his book.
From 1966 to 1975 he was Professor of History at the University of Reading. He was Director of the Centre for Policy Studies in London from 1979 to 1991, as an ally of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He became a life peer as Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, of Notting Hill in Greater London in 1981.
He has written pro-European political works, as well as histories. He is also the author of three novels.
Thomas is married to the former Vanessa Jebb, daughter of the first Acting United Nations Secretary-General Gladwyn Jebb
[edit] Works
- The Spanish Civil War (1961); revised and enlarged second edition (1977)
- Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom (1971)
- Europe: the Radical Challenge (1973)
- A History of the World (1979)
- Armed Truce (1986)
- Ever Closer Union (1991)
- Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico (1994)
- World History, The Story of Mankind from Prehistory to the Present (1996)
- Slave Trade (1997)
- S.S.1 - The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler (2001)
- Rivers of Gold (2003)
