Norman Davies, born in 1939 in Bolton (Lancashire) was educated at Bolton School, Magdalen College, Oxford, the University of Sussex and at several continental universities including Grenoble, Perugia and Kraków. His formative years created a lifelong European outlook. He was for many years Professor of History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies,  University of London, and has also taught as a visitor to Columbia, McGill, Hokkaido, Stanford, Harvard, Adelaide, and Australian National, Canberra.

He is the author of White Eagle, Red Star: the Polish-Soviet War, 1919-20 (1972): God’s Playground: A History of Poland (1981); the No.1 bestseller Europe: A History (1996);  The Isles: A History (1998); Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (with Roger Moorhouse, 2002);  Rising ’44, the Battle for Warsaw (2003);  Europe at War, 1939-45 (2006);  and Vanished Kingdoms (2011).  His books have been translated into more than twenty languages, and he is a regular broadcaster.

From 1997 to 2006 he was a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and is now an Honorary Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford and Professor at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow.  He has been a Fellow of the British Acadamy since 1997 and since 2011 of the Learned Society of Wales. He has been awarded Poland’s Order of the White Eagle and in Britain the CMG ‘for services to history’. He holds honorary doctorates from several universities in Britain and Poland as well as the honorary citizenship of five cities, and is a life member both of Clare Hall and of Peterhouse Cambridge.

He lives in Oxford and Cracow with his wife, Maria, and has two grown sons, Daniel and Christian.

“There is too much history,” he says, “for anyone to try and understand  it all.”