Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

During the Limerick Pogrom of 1904 they left Ireland and moved to Newcastle, England.

The father of his namesake, Bishop of Birmingham Hugh Montefiore, was the great-great-nephew of Sir Moses.

His family owned Bletchley Park until they sold it to the British government in 1938.

Nicholas Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (born 5 March 1955) is a British writer.

He trained as a barrister before becoming a journalist and then a non-fiction writer.

He has been married since 1989 to Aviva Burnstock, the head of the Department of Art Conservation & Technology at the Courtauld Institute in London.

His brother Simon Sebag Montefiore is also a writer, besides being an historian.

His cousin Denzil was a platoon commander at Dunkirk.

Montefiore's father, Stephen Eric Sebag-Montefiore, was descended from a line of wealthy Sephardic Jews who were diplomats and bankers all over Europe.

His previous book is Enigma: The Battle for the Code, the story of breaking the German Enigma machine code at Bletchley Park during the Second World War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).

His second book Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man was published in 2006.

In 2016, Somme: Into the Breach appeared in time for the 100th anniversary of the Somme Offensive.

Cecil Sebag-Montefiore, the author's great-grandfather, killed himself after serving with the Royal Engineers on the Western Front.

At the start of the 19th century, his great-great uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore, became a banking partner of N M Rothschild & Sons.

His mother, Phyllis April Jaffé, comes from a Lithuanian Jewish family of poor scholars.

Her parents fled the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century; they bought tickets for New York City, but were cheated, being instead dropped off at Cork, Ireland.