SIR NOEL MALCOLM is a British Historian whose research interests include the history of Western knowledge of and ideas about Islam and the Ottoman Empire from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. He read History and English Literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was a research student at Trinity College, Cambridge, writing a doctoral thesis on Thomas Hobbes. He began his career as a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; he was then political columnist and, subsequently, Foreign Editor of The Spectator, then chief political columnist of The Daily Telegraph. Since 2002 he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He has published books on, among other subjects, early modern philosophy (with an emphasis on Hobbes) and the history and culture of the Balkans.