Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, CH (9 April 1902 – 1 January 1986) was a British biographer, historian, and scholar.

Cecil was a delicate child, suffering from a tubercular gland in his neck at the age of 8 years, and after an operation he spent a great deal of time in bed, where he developed his love of reading.

While a professor at New College Cecil's pupils included Kingsley Amis, Bidhu Bhusan Das, R. K. Sinha, John Bayley, the Milton scholar Dennis Burden, and Ludovic Kennedy.

Cecil's words were: Past periods are like foreign countries: regions inhabited by men of like passions to our own, but with different customs and codes of behaviour.

[2][3]During his academic career Cecil published studies of Hardy, Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Dorothy Osborne and Walter Pater.

As well as his literary studies he also published a two-volume historical biography of Lord Melbourne (to whom he was distantly related) and appreciations of visual artists – Augustus John, Max Beerbohm, Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones.