Noel Malcolm

Noel Robert Malcolm (born 26 December 1956) is an English writer, historian and journalist, known for his polymathy, and his polyglottism.

Malcolm was educated at Eton College, Peterhouse, Cambridge, Trinity College, Cambridge, has a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, and was for a time Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is perhaps the world's leading authority on Thomas Hobbes; the scholarship in his edition of Hobbes's Correspondence (1994) (ISBN 0-19-823747-2) was described by one reviewer as 'beyond praise and almost beyond belief'.

He is a former Foreign Editor of The Spectator, and columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He gave up journalism in 1995 to become a full time writer, becoming in 2002 a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

His name appears among the founders of the now controversial British Helsinki Human Rights Group on behalf of which he had spoken as recently as 1999. He now chairs the Board of Trustees at the Bosnian Institute, an organization mainly devoted to providing information on Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Noel Malcolm is the author of Bosnia: A Short History (1994), Origins of English Nonsense (1997), Kosovo: A Short History (1998), Aspects of Hobbes (2002), and (with J. Stedall) John Pell (1611-1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (2005). He is the editor of The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (1994). He has also written George Enescu: His Life and Music (1990) (Toccata Press). He also wrote a pamphlet in 1991 titled Sense on Sovereignty, a discussion of the arguments about Britain's membership of the European Union published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

His books on the history of Bosnia and Kosovo have gained notable popularity in the West, taking their part in shaping Western public opinion about past and current events in the Balkans. His books are often criticised, most frequently from Serbia, where he is sometimes even described as a pen-for-hire (for an example see Response to Noel Malcolm's Book "Kosovo: A Short History"). Many have accused Malcolm of disregarding Serbian authors in his research.^{[citation needed]} Especially his book on Kosovo was written in a hurry and contains some bold claims regarding the origins of different peoples.^{[citation needed]}

• "Kosova është territor i humbur për Serbinë", Intervistoi Iliriana A. Bajo, Radio Evropa e Lirë, 3. Dhjetor, 2003.

• "Nato must remain until the job is done", The Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2001.

• "Milosevic was doomed by press freedom", The Sunday Telegraph, 1 July 2001.

• "Why we were right to bomb Kosovo", The Daily Telegraph, 24 March 2000.

• "Independence for Kosovo", The New York Times, 9 June 1999.

• "Kosovo, Serbian Nationalism and Territorial Partition", HABSBURG Reviews, 10 May 1999.

• "Response to Amos Perlmutter's op-ed "Who Will Run Kosovo", The Washington Times, 4 May 1999.

• "What Ancient Hatreds?", Foreign Affairs, January/February 1999.

• "Kosovo: Only Independence Will Work", The National Interest, Winter 1998/99.

• "Kicking Kenney on Kosovo", The Nation, 16 November 1998, Volume 267, Number 16.

• "Kosovo's History", New York Review of Books, 16 July 1998.

• "Kosovo and Bosnia: three points", Bosnian report, March-May 1998, New Series no.3.

• "The Past Must Not Be Prologue", Time, 30 March 1998, Vol. 151 N° 13.

• "The grandee and a question of genocide", Daily Mail, 6 November 1996.

• "Appease with Dishonor: Faulty History", Foreign Affairs, November/December 1995.

• "Britain's fatal foreign policy", Review of the book by Brendan Simms: Unfinest Hour: 'Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (Allen Lane/Penguin), Bosnian Report, January - May 2002, New Series No 27-28.

• "The dysfunctional functionary", The Sunday Telegraph, 20 October 2000.

• "Stay the Hand of Vengeance", Review of: Stay the Hand of Vengeance: the politics of war crimes tribunals, by Gary Bass, Princeton University Press, The Sunday Telegraph, 15 October 2000.

• "Fighting For Peace: Bosnia 1994", Review of the book by General Sir Michael Rose, Harvill, London, Bosnian Institute, 1998.

• "Norman Cigar's Genocide in Bosnia: the policy of ethnic cleansing", The Sunday Telegraph, 11 June 1995.

• "David Owen and his Balkan bungling", extended version of a review of Lord Owen's "Balkan Odyssey" (London 1995, New York 1996), first published in The Sunday Telegraph on 12 November 1995.