Michael Burleigh

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Michael Burleigh is a British author and historian.

In 1977 he took a first class honours degree in Medieval and Modern History at University College London, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer prizes. After a PhD in medieval history in 1982, he went on to hold posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and University of Cardiff where he was Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History. He has also been Raoul Wallenberg Chair of Human Rights at Rutgers University, William Rand Kenan Professor of History at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, and Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University. In 2002 he gave the three Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial Lectures at Heythrop College, University of London. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He founded the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies.

His books have been translated into Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Polish.

He has also been active in bringing history to television audiences. In 1991 he won the British Film Institute Award for Archival Achievement for the Channel 4/Domino Films documentary Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich and a 1993 New York Film and Television Festival Award Bronze Medal for Heil Herbie: The Story of the Volkswagen Beetle (Channel 4/Domino Films).

Recently his books have become controversial and accused of showing a marked dislike for all things Islamic. In his Guardian review of Sacred Causes,on 28th October 2006, John Gray wrote "Burleigh is at his most unbalanced when discussing Islam. Much of his analysis is presented in a graffiti-like style that makes the tabloids look effete and precious. A photograph of the World Trade Center in flames is captioned with the statement 'This act of mass murder announced the onset of unlimited Islamist aggression against western civilisation', and there is much demotic rant against multiculturalism and what Burleigh describes as 'the grim prospect of "Eurabia"'. In this atmosphere of feverish emotion, facts tend to get lost and longer historical perspectives forgotten. Like Christianity, Islam has a powerful apocalyptic tradition that can easily turn to violence. But there is nothing peculiarly Islamic about suicide bombing, which was first developed by the Tamil Tigers - a Marxist-Leninist party that until the war in Iraq had committed more suicide bombings than any other group."

He has been married since 1991 to Linden Burleigh and they live in South East London. ^[1]

[edit] Books

Michael Burleigh's books include

The Third Reich: A New History (Pan Macmillan) which won the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction;
Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge University Press 1997);
Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900-1945 (originally 1994 Pan Macmillan 2002);
The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge University Press 1991-);
Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (originally 1988 Pan Macmillan 2002);
Confronting the Nazi Past (St Martin's Press 1995);
Prussian Society and the German Order (Cambridge University Press 1984);
Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War HarperCollins 2005 ISBN 0-00-719572-9
Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Quaeda HarperCollins 2006 ISBN 978-0-00-719574-9