Victor Kiernan (1913-2009) was born in Manchester and educated at Cambridge. He was a member until 1959 of the Communist Party Historians Group alongside Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and Dorothy and Edward Thompson. He taught history at Edinburgh and in Lahore and wrote for New Left Review. His books included Lords of Human Kind, America: The New Imperialism and two studies of Shakespeare.
A much-needed survey of European colonial campaigns, brilliant in the choice of examples from an extraordinarily wide reading. -- Eric Hobsbawm * London Review of Books * One of Britain's foremost historians working in the Marxist tradition. His time in India, which remained closer to heart than any other country, significantly influenced how he came to view European imperialism. * The Times *