Noel Malcolm

Noel Malcolm is an English writer and journalist, known for his historical works, his polymathy, and his polyglottism.

Malcolm was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, and was for a time Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is perhaps the world's leading authority on Thomas Hobbes; the scholarship in his edition of Hobbes's Correspondence (1994) (ISBN 0-19-823747-2) was justly described by one reviewer as 'beyond praise and almost beyond belief'.

He is a former Foreign Editor of The Spectator, and columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He gave up journalism in 1995 to become a full time writer, and is now a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

His name appears among the founders of the now controversial British Helsinki Human Rights Group on behalf of which he had spoken as recently as 1999. He has apparently left, as he knows better than defend Milosevic out of ideological hatred for international justice.

Noel Malcolm is the author of Bosnia: A Short History (1994), Origins of English Nonsense (1997), Kosovo: A Short History (1998), Aspects of Hobbes (2002), and (with J. Stedall) John Pell (1611-1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (2005). He is the editor of The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (1994). He has also written George Enescu: His Life and Music (1990) (Toccata Press).

His books on the history of Bosnia and Kosovo have gained notable popularity in the West, taking their part in shaping Western public opinion about current events in the Balkans. However, because they contradict the Serbs' nationalist myths (along with the lesser myths of the other Balkan peoples), Malcolm has been criticized, notably by Serb-influenced writers who questioned his motives (for example Response to Noel Malcolm's Book "Kosovo: A Short History" For replies, see "What Ancient Hatreds?", "Kosovo's History", or "Kosovo, Serbian Nationalism and Territorial Partition").