Speakers

Peter Snow is a highly respected journalist, author and broadcaster. He was ITN’s Diplomatic and Defence Correspondent from 1966 to 1979 and presented BBC’s Newsnight from 1980 to 1997. An indispensable part of election nights, he has also covered military matters on and off the world’s battlefields for forty years. He presented the BBC documentaries Battlefield Britain and The World’s Greatest Twentieth Century Battlefields with his son Dan. He is the author of several books including To War with Wellington and When Britain Burned the White House.

Ann MacMillan was born in Wales, the great granddaughter of David Lloyd George, and grew up in Canada where she worked for CHIN Radio, Global TV News and CTV News. She moved to London in 1976 when she married Peter Snow and worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation until 2013. She was the CBC’s managing editor in London for the last thirteen years of her career.

Military historian, author and defence analyst, Dr Peter Caddick-Adams is a specialist speaker who has made a major academic and popular contribution to the understanding of past battles.

He has led hundreds of visits and studied more than 50 battlefields around the world, covering all periods in history, from the Romans to the present day. He has written about many campaigns and gives engaging and informative talks about famous military campaigns generally followed by a book signing session. Recent subjects have included then horrors of Monte Casino and the invasion of Sicily.

Tim Clayton is the author of a number of books on military history and is also an authority on eighteenth-century prints. His recent work includes the catalogue of the British Museum exhibition Bonaparte and the British, of which he was co-curator, and Waterloo: Four Days that changed Europe’s Destiny.

His most recent book This Dark Business: the secret war against Napoleon is about the early propaganda campaign against Napoleon (secretly sponsored by government) and about anglo-royalist efforts to secure counter-revolution in France. He is currently a senior fellow of the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and is working on a book about the caricaturist James Gillray.

Cedric Delves entered the Army through RMA Sandhurst in 1966, was commissioned into the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment, subsequently joining the SAS. He directed all UK Special Forces before becoming Commander of the Field Army. He was medically discharged having lost a leg to a drunk driver. He is the author of Across an Angry Sea: The SAS in the Falkland War, written as a tribute to the soldiers involved.

Damien Lewis is a number one bestselling author whose books have been translated into over forty languages worldwide. For decades he worked as a war and conflict reporter for the world’s major broadcasters, reporting from across Africa, South America, the Middle and Far East and winning numerous awards.

His books include the World War Two classics Churchill’s Secret Warriors, SAS Nazi Hunters, Hunting the Nazi Bomb and SAS Ghost Patrol. A dozen of his books have been made, or are being made, into movies or TV drama series and several have been adapted as plays for the stage. He has raised tens of thousands of pounds for charitable concerns connected with his writings.

Roger Moorhouse is a historian and author, specialising in Nazi Germany, Central Europe and World War Two in Europe.

A fluent German speaker, he is the author of a number of books – including Berlin at War (Basic Books, 2010), The Devils’ Alliance (Bodley Head, 2014) and The Third Reich in 100 Objects (Greenhill, 2017) – and has been published in over 20 languages.

Roger is a visiting professor, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a book reviewer for the national and specialist history press.  He lives in Hertfordshire, UK.

Patrick Porter is Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham. He is also Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, London.

His research interests are great power politics, US/UK foreign and defence policy, and the interaction of power and ideas in the making of them. His book Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018) was shortlisted for the British Army Military Book of the Year Prize, 2019.

He has also written The Global Village Myth: Distance, War and the Limits of Power (Georgetown University Press, 2015) and Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (Columbia University Press, 2009.

He has published in International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, International Affairs, Security Dialogue, Diplomacy and Statecraft, and War in History, and The National Interest online.

He has appeared as an expert witness before the parliamentary Defence Select Committee, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy.

Dilip Sarkar is a prolific, best-selling, author well-known for his extensive work on the Battle of Britain period, and most recently on Arnhem. Concentrating on the human experience, Dilip is driven to record and share the deeply moving stories of casualties, with an emphasis on the ‘missing’, and survivors’ memories.

This retired police detective with a First in Modern History was made an MBE for ‘services to aviation history’ in 2003 and elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society in 2006. He exhibits and speaks internationally, having presented at such prestigious venues as the Imperial War, RAF and Airborne Museums, National Memorial Arboretum and Oxford University, and works on TV documentaries on and off-screen. For more information: www.ourfinesthour.net

Gary is one of the UK’s leading military historians. His many books include Forgotten Victory – The First World War: Myths & Realities (2001), A Short History of the First World War (2014), and Douglas Haig: From the Somme to Victory (2016). His most recent book appeared this year: Wellington in the ‘Pocket Giants’ series. Gary is currently writing Civilian Armies, a comparative history of the experience of British and Dominion soldiers across the two world wars.

Since 2013 Gary has been Professor of War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, having previous held Chairs at the University of Birmingham and King’s College London. Gary is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, and is Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Curriers. He regularly writes for the BBC History Magazine and History Today, and often appears on radio and television and writes in the national press. He advises the Department of Media, Culture and Sport and the Ministry of Defence on the First World War centenary. Married with a grown up daughter and son, Gary lives in Wantage.

Stuart Tootal is a former army Colonel, a best-selling author and currently a global head in the corporate security sector. His exceptional military career has seen him serve in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Stuart has served with the Queen’s Own Highlanders in several tours of Northern Ireland during the Troubles and has seen active service in the 1991 Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also completed postings in the MOD’s strategic plans department and was a personal lieutenant colonel military assistant to the Chief of the General Staff. He was awarded an OBE for this role in 2005.

He was selected to command the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment (3 PARA) in 2005. This included commanding the first UK battle group of 1200 soldiers to be sent to Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan in 2006, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

The fighting 3 PARA experienced in Afghanistan has been described as the most intense combat the British Army has witnessed since the Korean War. Fifteen members of the battle group were killed in action and another 46 were wounded. On returning to the UK, Stuart set up the Afghanistan Trust charity in 2007.

Stuart resigned from the Army following promotion to full colonel in 2008 and is currently the global head of security for a major corporate bank. He is also the bank’s head of their UK Military Services Network.

Stuart is the founder and Chairman of the trustees of the Parachute Regiment Afghanistan Trust charity for wounded paratroopers and is the author of the Sunday Times best seller Danger Close.

Annabel Venning graduated in History and Politics from Durham University, before embarking on a career as a journalist. She has written for numerous magazines and newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Times. She is now a frequent contributor to the Mail on Sunday, for which she covers a wide variety of historical topics. Additionally, she advises the Books Department of the Daily Mail on the serialization and abridgement of non-fiction books, including many works of history.

Annabel’s first book, the critically acclaimed Following the Drum: The Lives of Army Wives and Daughters, painted a portrait of the women who followed and supported the British Army across four centuries of war, and was published by Headline in 2005.

On a personal front, Annabel is the daughter of an army officer and the granddaughter of two army officers, all of whom served in the Gurkhas. Born in Hong Kong, she has also lived in Brunei and Germany, and has now finally settled in the Chalke Valley in Wiltshire with her two children, two dogs, and one husband, in the form of the author and journalist, Guy Walters.

Danny West joined 22 SAS from the Royal Corps of Signals. He was commissioned in the rank of Captain in 1982, his first appointment being Second-in-Command of D Squadron 22 SAS in the Falklands War. Several tours followed at regimental service and on the Staff before his retirement in the rank of major in 1995. He lives with his family outside Hereford. He helped Cedric Delves produce Across An Angry Sea.