John Morrill was educated in Oxford and spent forty years teaching and researching in Cambridge, where he was Professor of British and Irish History and successively Tutor, Senior Tutor, and Vice Master of Selwyn College. As Vice President of the Royal Historical Society, Vice President for Public Engagement at the British Academy, and Chair of the Research Committee at the Arts and Humanities Research Board, he promoted historical scholarship and digital humanities. He has published 25 books and acted as series editor for four major publishers and he edited The Historical Journal for 10 years and then served as Chair of the Editorial Board. He is an Honorary Fellow of both Trinity College Dublin and Trinity College Oxford and is an Hon.Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Although he has written on every century since the fifteenth century, his centre of gravity has always been the middle decades of the seventeenth century and the career of Oliver Cromwell.