Noel Malcolm

Sir Noel Robert Malcolm, (born 26 December 1956) is an English political journalist, historian and academic, currently a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

A King's Scholar at Eton College, Malcolm Read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and received his doctorate in history from Trinity College, Cambridge.

He was a Fellow and College Lecturer of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before becoming a political and foreign affairs journalist for The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph.

Malcolm was born on 26 December 1956.

He was educated at Eton College, an all-boys public school near Windsor, Berkshire, as a King's Scholar.

He studied history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, between 1974 and 1978.

He received his PhD in history while he was at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Malcolm was a Fellow and college lecturer at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from 1981 to 1988.

He was a political columnist (1987–1991), then the foreign editor (1991–1992) of The Spectator, and a political columnist for the Daily Telegraph (1992–1995).

He was jointly awarded the T. E. Utley Prize for Political Journalism in 1991.

He stepped away from journalism in 1995 to become a writer and academic, being appointed as a Visiting Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, for two years.

In 1995 he gave up journalism to become a full-time writer.

He was a Visiting Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1995–1996, and has been a senior research fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, since 2002.

He serves on the advisory board of the conservative magazine Standpoint.

Malcolm used to be the chairman of the Bosnian Institute, London, and president of the Anglo-Albanian Association.

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1997 and a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2001.

Malcolm became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1997 and a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2001.

He is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers.

Malcolm's book Kosovo: A Short History (1998) was the subject of an extended debate in Foreign Affairs.

The debate began with a review of the book by Aleksa Djilas, a former Fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, who wrote that the book was "marred by his sympathies for its ethnic Albanian separatists, anti-Serbian bias, and illusions about the Balkans".

Malcolm responded that Djilas had not produced any evidence to counter the evidence in the book, and had instead resorted to belittling both Malcolm and his work, including the use of personal slurs and patronising language.

The debate continued with Serbian-born Professor Stevan K. Pavlowitch of the University of Southampton asserting that Malcolm's book lacked precision, Melanie McDonagh of the Bosnian Institute claiming that Djilas's review took a "nationalistic approach", and Norman Cigar of Marine Corps University stating that Djilas was trying to create myths to legitimise Serbian actions in Kosovo.

Other reviews of Kosovo: A Short History were varied.

For example, in English Historical Review, Zbyněk Zeman observed that Malcolm "tries not to take sides", but in American Historical Review, Nicholas J. Miller stated that the book was "conceptually flawed" by Malcolm's insistence on treating Kosovo as "a place on its own; [rather than as] a scrap of irredenta that Serbs and Albanians fight over".

Later the same year Thomas Emmert of the history faculty of Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota, reviewed the book in the Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans Online and, while praising aspects of the book, also asserted that it was "shaped by the author's overriding determination to challenge Serbian myths".

He claimed that Malcolm was "partisan" and complained that the book made a "transparent attempt to prove that the main Serbian myths are false".

Malcolm responded in the same journal in early 2000, asserting that the book challenged both Albanian and Serbian myths about Kosovo, but that there were more Serbian myths about Kosovo than Albanian ones and this explained the greater coverage of Serbian myths in the book.

He also observed that Emmert's perspective and work were largely within the framework of Serbian historiography, and that that was the reason for Emmert's assertion that Malcolm was "partisan".

He has also contributed more than 40 journal articles or chapters in books since 2002.

Malcolm has written many articles for newspapers, magazines and journals.

Other than his work for The Spectator, the Daily Telegraph and Standpoint he has had articles published in The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Times, Time and the Daily Mail, among other publications.

He has also contributed book reviews mainly to The Sunday Telegraph.

He has contributed to a number of journals including Foreign Affairs and the New York Review of Books.

Malcolm edited Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Clarendon Press, 2007), The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (1994) and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (three volumes, Oxford University Press, 2012), for which he was awarded a British Academy Medal.

He is a Member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo, and an honorary fellow of both Peterhouse, Cambridge (since 2010), and Trinity College, Cambridge (since 2011).

In 2013, he was awarded the British Academy Medal for his book Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan.

He was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.

Malcolm was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.

In 2016, he was awarded the Presidential Gold Medal of the League of Prizren by the president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi.

Malcolm is the author of