Denis Hugh Vercingetorix Brogan (born 20 March 1936), known as Hugh Brogan, is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 and biographer.

Early life

The son of Sir Denis Brogan, he was educated at St Faith's School

St Faith's School

St Faith's School is an independent preparatory day school on Trumpington Road, Cambridge, England, for boys and girls aged four to thirteen. The present headmaster is Nigel Helliwell, and the school has in excess of five hundred children...

, Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

, Repton School

Repton School

Repton School, founded in 1557, is a co-educational English independent school for both day and boarding pupils, in the British public school tradition, located in the village of Repton, in Derbyshire, in the Midlands area of England...

, and St John's College, Cambridge

St John's College, Cambridge

St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's alumni include nine Nobel Prize winners, six Prime Ministers, three archbishops, at least two princes, and three Saints....

, graduating BA

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 in 1959 and MA in 1964. As a young man he was apparently interested in Hobbits, as evidenced by a letter in reply to him from J.R.R. Tolkien, dated 7 April 1948 :P.

Career

Brogan was on the staff of The Economist

The Economist

The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...

 from 1960 to 1963, and was elected a Harkness Fellow

Harkness Fellowship

The Harkness Fellowships are a programme run by the Commonwealth Fund of New York City. They were established to reciprocate the Rhodes Scholarships and enable Fellows from several countries to spend time studying in the United States...

 in 1962, then was a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, from 1963 to 1974. He was then part of the department of history at the University of Essex

University of Essex

The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...

 from 1974 to 1998, first as a lecturer, then a reader, and finally as R. A. Butler Professor of History from 1992 to 1998.

Major publications

• Tocqueville (1973)
• The Times Reports The American Civil War (1975)
• The Life of Arthur Ransome (1984)
• The Longman History of the United States of America (1985, reprinted as The Penguin History of the United States of America, 1990)
• Mowgli's Sons: Kipling and Baden-Powell's Scouts (1987)
• , (1991, with Anne P. Kerr)
• American Presidential Families [with Charles Mosley] (1993)
• Kennedy (1996)
• Signalling from Mars: the letters of Arthur Ransome (1997, ed.)
• Alexis de Tocqueville: a biography (2006)

External links

• Brogan's staff page at the University of Essex