LAUSR

Abstract After working in the Foreign Office, standing unsuccessfully as a Labour parliamentary candidate and briefly lecturing at Sandhurst, Hugh Thomas tried his hand as a novelist but found his metier when he accepted an invitation to write a history of the Spanish Civil War. For its colourful style and immense scholarship, it was hailed as a classic and opened the way many equally readable works on Cuba, Mexico and the Spanish Empire. After ten years as Professor of History at the University of Reading, he became one of Thatcher's advisers and was ennobled as Lord Thomas of Swynnerton.