Our Patrons
Sir Antony Beevor
Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, where he studied military history under John Keegan. A regular officer with the 11th Hussars, he left the Army after five years to write. He has published four novels, and thirteen books of non-fiction. His work has appeared in thirty-four foreign languages and sold more than eight million and a half copies.
Stalingrad, first published in 1998, won the first Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1999. Berlin – The Downfall 1945, published in 2002, was accompanied by a BBC Timewatch programme on his research into the subject. It was a No. 1 Bestseller in seven countries apart from Britain, and in the top five in another nine countries. The book received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award.
D-Day – The Battle for Normandy, published in June 2009, was a No 1 Bestseller in seven countries, including the UK and France, and in the top ten in another eight countries. It received the Prix Henry Malherbe in France and the Westminster Medal from the Royal United Services Institute. His book Arnhem – The Battle for the Bridges (2018) is another international bestseller.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and the Royal Historical Society in 2017. He was the 2002-2003 Lees-Knowles lecturer at Cambridge. He has been a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London and at the University of Kent.
In 2014 he received the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, and in 2016 the Norton Medlicott Medal for Service to History. He was awarded a knighthood in the 2017 New Year’s Honours List. He is married to the writer and biographer Artemis Cooper and they have a daughter Nella and a son Adam.
Sir David Omand GCB
Sir David is a Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and sits on the advisory board of Paladin Capital, investing in cyber security start-ups. During his long career in British government service he held senior posts in security, intelligence and defence.
He was Director of GCHQ (the UK Signals Intelligence and Cyber Security Agency) from July 1996 until December 1997, Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office and UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office (2002 to 2005), responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national Counter Terrorism strategy and “homeland security”. He also served in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy and was Principal Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Defence during the Falklands conflict. He served for three years with the Diplomatic Service as the UK Defence Counsellor in NATO, Brussels and for seven years on the UK Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). For twelve years he was a non-executive Director of Babcock International Group plc (for eight years the Senior Independent Director).
He was educated at the Glasgow Academy and was a foundation scholar in economics at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he is an honorary Fellow. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by Birmingham and Glasgow Universities. He gained a first in maths and theoretical physics with the Open University in 2008.
His published books are Securing the State (2010), Principled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence (with Prof Mark Phythian) (2018) and How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence (2020), now published as a Penguin paperback.