Sir Martin Gilbert is Winston Churchill's official biographer, and a leading historian of the modern world. He is an Honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and a Distinguished Fellow of Hillsdale College, Michigan. From 2009 to 2012 he served as a member of the British Government's Iraq Inquiry.

He is the author of more than eighty books, among them the single-volume Churchill: A Life, his twin histories First World War and Second World War, a comprehensive History of Israel, and his three-volume work, A History of the Twentieth Century. His book The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (published in the United States as The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War) is a classic work on the subject.