Desmond Seward is best known for The Monks of War (1972), The Wars of the Roses (1995) - both republished by the Folio Society - and A Brief History of the Hundred Years War that has stayed in print in Britain and the United States since its publication in 1978. However, his own favourites among his books are Old Puglia: A Portrait of South Eastern Italy (with Susan Mountgarret, 2009) and Wings over the Desert (2009), an account of his father's experiences as an RFC pilot in Palestine during the First World War. He was born in 1935 in Paris where his father was managing director of Timken Français, into a family of Anglo-Irish origin that had been wine-merchants at Bordeaux since the 1870s (a background that instilled a lasting love of France) and educated at Ampleforth and at St Catharine's College, Cambridge as an Exhibitioner in History. Unfashionably, harking back to Gibbon and Macaulay, he believes that history is literature - that readability and accessibility are of vital importance.