A. D. Harvey

Arnold D. Harvey (born 1947) is an English historian and novelist.

Born in and brought up in Colchester, A.D.Harvey read Modern History under Keith Thomas at St John's College, Oxford and obtained his Ph.D. in History at Cambridge only six years after sitting his G.C.E. A-levels, being a member of University College, now Wolfson College, Cambridge.

In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, he stated that "practically everyone [he] met while an undergraduate 1966-69" was "bored, frustrated and above all disillusioned by an Oxford that was so much more mundane than their school daydreams". His first novel, Oxford: The Novel, fictionalises his time as an undergraduate. It is peppered with erotically charged scenes and attacks on the Oxford student left.

Harvey has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Salerno, La Réunion and Leipzig. He has written several academic monographs dealing with aspects of English cultural, social and military history. These have generally been well received. Kathryn Hughes called him "a master of the concrete, the adroit displayer of the precious scrap of hard fact". At times his works have been described by reviews as somewhat encyclopaedic and lacking in analysis, though Andrew Roberts in The Times wrote of his "academically immaculate analyses" and most critics acknowledge the originality of his theoretical ideas. He was briefly editor of the journal Salisbury Review. He has also contributed widely to History Today magazine and to BBC History Magazine on subjects as diverse as Napoleon, the boroughs of London, Gustav III of Sweden Engelbert Dollfuss. Churchill on Rollerskates and the Stuka dive-bomber. He has made numerous contributions to specialist journals on different aspects of air warfare and is also known for his pioneering work in The National Archives at Kew on material by or about well-known writers: he has found and published hitherto unknown texts by, amongst others,Lord Byron, Richard Burton, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Ezra Pound.

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