A little about myself. I was born in the United States, grew up in Australia, educated (to the best of my abilities) in Britain, worked in Canada, but now live in New York. 

I took a doctorate in history from Cambridge, but then became a journalist. After that, I went into the History Business around the time my book, Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring, first appeared. It’s since been used as the basis for the AMC drama series, Turn: Washington's Spies, on which I served as writer/producer.

In 2020, I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (you could actually hear the barrel being scraped) and I’m a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

I’ve so far written six books. The latest is The Lion And The Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy. My first, however, was Kings in the North, about the medieval Anglo-Scottish Wars, and then came Washington’s Spies;  American Rifle: A Biography; Men of War: The American Experience of Battle at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima; and Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World. That one tells the story of the Hindenburg, Pan Am, and the struggle for mastery of the air during the Golden Age of aviation in the 1920s and 1930s. 

I’m currently working on the seventh book, about a World War Two spymaster and a rogue Navy captain who together audaciously sought to capture, not sink, a U-boat.

If you’re interested in historical espionage and spy intrigue, please subscribe (free!) to my Substack newsletter, Spionage.

If you’re more interested, however, in offering me Lucrative Business Opportunities, my agent is Eric Lupfer at UTA.

Or you can just email me via the Contact page.