Name: Professor Richard Holmes
Field: Historian
Productions:
An Audience With Richard Holmes

Biography:

Richard Holmes was educated at Cambridge and was a member of the Department of War Studies at RMA Sandhurst between 1969 and 1985, when he left to command 2nd Battalion The Wessex Regiment.

While serving full-time he helped to set up the Higher Command and Staff Course at the Army Staff College, and retains responsibility for part of the operational military history taught on the course.

In 1990 he became Director of Cranfield University’s Security Studies Institute, and he spends much of his time teaching post-graduate students at the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham and lecturing at home and abroad.

Professor Holmes has written over a dozen books on military topics.

He is best known for Firing Line a study of human behaviour in battle, and Soldiers, the book of the prizewinning BBC TV series, which he wrote in association with John Keegan.

In 1993 he rode on horseback from Mons to the River Marne, following the route of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, and the ensuing book, Riding the Retreat, was published in 1995.

He is general editor of Oxford University Press’s Companion to Military History.

He has written and presented several television programmes, including two six-part BBC TWO series, War Walks I and War Walks II, as well as a series on the Western Front which was televised in the summer of 1999.

He wrote books to accompany each of these series. His Second World War book and series, Battlefields, appeared in 2001.

Richard Holmes enlisted into the Territorial Army in 1964 and was commissioned two years later.

He received the CBE in the 1998 New Year’s Honours. In September 1999 he became Colonel of the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment.