He was born in Whiston, Merseyside and moved to the United States in 1994.

His first book Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War, a study of the post-1945 military demobilisation experience in Britain, was published by Yale University Press in 2009 and won the 2010 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award.

[1] His second book, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier goes to War 1939-1945 was published, also by Yale, in 2015.

In 2020 he completed the first in a two-part history of Britain in the Second World War, Britain at Bay 1938-1941 , which was published by Profile Books in the UK and Knopf in North America.

This article about a British historian or genealogist is a stub.