Born into a middle-class family in Chorlton-on-Medlock, he was educated at William Hulme's Grammar School in Manchester, serving as an officer in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War.
After the end of the war, Flinn took a history degree at the University of Manchester before spending two years as a grammar school teacher while writing a postgraduate dissertation in his spare time.
[2] After his retirement in 1978, he lectured in the United States and continental Europe, serving as president of the Economic History Society from 1980 to 1983, when he died in Stroud, Gloucestershire.
John Benson said "Flinn's history is based on a prodigious amount of archival research in libraries and record offices across the British Isles [yet] this great mass of material never threatens to become overpowering".
John Harris had a personal appreciation:For many of us, and particularly those who knew him over many years, the book's arrival is clouded by Michael Flinn's death shortly before it appeared.