Simon Frederick Peter Halliday FBA (22 February 1946 – 26 April 2010) was an Irish writer and academic specialising in international relations and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Cold War, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1946[1] to an English father, businessman Arthur Halliday,[2] and an Irish mother, Rita (née Finigan), From 1950 to 1953, Halliday attended the Marist School, Dundalk (at that time the primary school for St Mary's College, Dundalk[3]), and Ampleforth College (1953–1963) before going up to Queen's College, Oxford, in 1964 to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), graduating in 1967, and then on to the School of Oriental and African Studies (1969) where he earned his MSc in Middle East politics.
From 1969 to 1983, he served as a member of editorial board of the New Left Review, and worked partially in publishing, in what now is Verso Books.
After recovering from illness in 2002–2003, he was made Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the LSE in 2005, but in 2008 he retired and became an ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, in Barcelona where he collaborated intensely with the LSE Alumni Association Spain.
Other than English, he was competent in a further eleven languages: Latin, Greek, Catalan, Persian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese and Arabic.