Gerard DeGroot is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, where he has taught since 1985. An American by birth, he came to Britain in 1980 to do a PhD at Edinburgh University. He is the author of ten highly acclaimed books on twentieth-century history and has published widely in academic journals and in the popular press. His study of the atomic bomb, The Bomb: A Life, won the RUSI Westminster Medal, awarded in Britain to the best book published in the English language on a war or military topic, and The Sixties Unplugged, his acclaimed account of that dazzling decade, was published by Macmillan in 2008.