Desmond Seward

Desmond Seward (born 22 May 1935, Paris) is a British popular historian and the author of many books, including biographies of Henry IV of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie Antoinette, Empress Eugenie and Napoleon's Family. He specializes in Britain and France in the late Middle Ages. He lives in the English countryside on the Berkshire-Wiltshire border.

Seward's father was William Eric Louis Seward, MC (1891–1975), a Franco-Irishman and industrialist in France whose experiences as a World War I aviator in Palestine were documented by his son in Wings over the Desert (2009). Born in Paris into a family long established at Bordeaux, Seward was educated at Ampleforth in North Yorkshire and at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He has written extensively on medieval France, also about the military religious orders on which he is considered an authority. Seward is fluent in French and reads Italian, Latin, medieval English and Norman French. He is noted for conducting research on primary sources at relevant foreign locations, and has written historically-oriented travel books. His work has been translated into ten languages including Hebrew and Japanese.

Seward's work has been mainly well received by critics as offering the general reader a balance of readability and modern scholarship. The First Bourbon (1971), a biography of Henry IV, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, was described by Dame Veronica Wedgwood in the Daily Telegraph as a "sympathetic and well balanced portrait, drawn with a vigorous enthusiasm suitable to the subject ... a most enjoyable and useful biography of a great man." History Today called it "An admirable book. Here a great success story ... is not only told with much verve and pellucid readability, but above all is told from within the age itself."

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