Hugh Thomas

Hugh Swynnerton Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton (born 21 October 1931 in Windsor), is a British historian, writer and Hispanist.

Thomas was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset before taking a BA in 1953 at Queens' College, Cambridge. He gained a First Class in Part I of the History Tripos in 1952 and was President of the Union in 1953. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. His 1961 book The Spanish Civil War won the Somerset Maugham Award for 1962. A significantly revised and enlarged third edition was published in 1977. Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (1971) is a book of over 1,500 pages tracing the history of Cuba from Spanish colonial rule until the Cuban Revolution. Thomas spent ten years researching the contents of his book.

Thomas is married to the former Vanessa Jebb, daughter of the first Acting United Nations Secretary-General Gladwyn Jebb, and ambassador in Paris. He has three children. From 1966 to 1975 Thomas was Professor of History at the University of Reading. He was Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies in London from 1979 to 1991, this worked for the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He became a life peer as Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, of Notting Hill in Greater London in letters patent dated 16 June 1981. He has written pro-European political works, as well as histories. He is also the author of three novels.

Thomas's The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 "begins with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, before Columbus's voyage to the New World, and ends with the last gasp of the slave trade, long since made illegal elsewhere, in Cuba and Brazil, twenty-five years after the American Emancipation Proclamation," according to the summary on the book jacket.

This Hugh Thomas should not be confused with two other historical writers: W. Hugh Thomas who writes about Nazi Germany and Hugh M. Thomas an American who writes on English history.