Professor of French History at Cambridge University, is a leading scholar of Anglo-French relations – an Englishman with Irish connections who has spent a life studying France. Of his new book The English and Their History (2014) he writes in the Introduction, ‘Had I been a life-long English specialist, I doubt I would have had the nerve to try it.’ His other books include The Paris Commune 1871 (1999) and, co-written with his wife Isabelle, the acclaimed That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (2006)