Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has won honours for his work on maritime and colonial history, including the Caird medel of the National Maritime Museum in 1997 and the John Carter Brown Medal in 1999.

"Fernandez-Armesto is a superb storyteller, with a barrel-full of anecdotes and a language as finely textured as any novelist's." Independent on Sunday * "This is a contentious, provocative work, full of utterly original and sometimes perverse perspectives." - Timothy Mo, The Independent * "He accosts you, proposes an interesting subject, and then extends it at enormous length... This is all good fun, and highly readable." - Richard Gott, Literary Review * "Witty...sharply original." Neal Ascherson, The Observer

Felipe Fernandez Armesto has been a member of the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford University since 1983, was a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study for 1999/2000 and is currently Union Pacific Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota. Honours won for his work on maritime and colonial history include the Caird Medal of the National Maritime Museum in 1997 and the John Carter Brown Medal in 1999. He is the author of numerous books, most notably Millenium: A History of the last Thousand Years (1995).