Simon Ball holds the chair of International History and Politics at the University of Leeds. He was previously Professor of Contemporary History and Head of Humanities at the University of Glasgow. He is the editor of War in History, the world's leading academic journal devoted to the study of war in all its aspects, and his previous publications include The Guardsman: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made (2004) and The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean, 1935-1949 (2009).