Since 2019, he has been a Senior Associate Fellow[1] at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defence and security think tank.

[3] Kampfner was born in Singapore to a Jewish father from Bratislava and a Protestant mother from Chatham-Kent.

His film War Spin,[5] exposing the propaganda behind the rescue of Jessica Lynch, received considerable publicity in the US and UK.

[9] In 2008 he was Founder Chair of Turner Contemporary, an art gallery in Margate designed by architect Sir David Chipperfield which has been seen as a model of arts-based regeneration.

In the same year, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Bath Spa University for services to arts education and the creative industries.

These include: Inside Yeltsin's Russia: Corruption, Conflict, Capitalism (1994), an account of the early years of post-Communism; a 1998 biography of former Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook,[13] and a study of Tony Blair's interventionist foreign policy Blair's Wars (2003), which gave one of the first authoritative accounts of the Iraq war and used in subsequent Whitehall enquiries, as well as school and university texts.

[16] The Rich, a 2000-year history, from slaves to super-yachts, is a historical comparison between contemporary oligarchs and those down the ages.

His sixth book Why The Germans Do It Better, Notes From A Grown-Up Country, was published by Atlantic in August 2020.