Michael Burleigh (born 3 April 1955) is an English author and historian whose primary focus is on Nazi Germany and related subjects. He has also been active in bringing history to television.

Early life

Michael Burleigh was born on 3 April 1955. He was awarded a first class honours degree in medieval and modern history from University College London in 1977, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer Prizes.

Career

After a PhD in medieval history from Bedford College, London in 1982, he held posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics and then at Cardiff University, where he was a distinguished research professor in modern history.^[1] He has also been Professor of History at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, and Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University.^{[citation needed]} In 2002 he gave the three Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial Lectures at Heythrop College, University of London.

Burleigh is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He founded the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Books of his have been translated into Czech, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish and Spanish.^[1]

He has also been active in bringing history to television audiences. In 1991 he won the British Film Institute Award for Archival Achievement for the Channel 4/Domino Films documentary Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich. In 1993 he gained a New York Film and Television Festival Award Bronze Medal for Heil Herbie: The Story of the Volkswagen Beetle (Channel 4/Domino Films).^[1]

Burleigh was on the advisory board of, and contributed regularly to, the magazine Standpoint, the last issue of which was published in 2021.^[2] He won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction in 2001 for The Third Reich: A New History and the Nonino International Master of His Time Prize in 2012. David Cesarani praised the book's masterful synthesis in Literary Review, noting how Burleigh grafts a thorough command of relevant memoirs onto quantitative data and theories of totalitarianism, providing "one arresting anecdote after another to personalise the bigger argument."^[3]

His Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–65 was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2013. He writes for three English dailies: The Times, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.

Personal life

Burleigh has been married since 1991 to Linden Burleigh. They live in South East London.^[1]

Selected works

• Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich. London: Domino Films
• Prussian Society and the German Order. Cambridge University Press, 1984
• Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press, 1988
• The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 – with Wolfgang Wippermann. Cambridge University Press, 1991
• Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900–1945. Cambridge University Press, 1994
• Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide. Cambridge University Press, 1997
• Confronting the Nazi Past. St Martin's Press, 1995
• The Third Reich: A New History. Macmillan, 2000
• Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War. HarperCollins, 2005 ISBN 0-00-719572-9
• Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda. HarperCollins, 2006 ISBN 978-0-00-719574-9
• Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism. Harper Collins, 2008
• Moral Combat: A History of World War II. Harper, 2010 ISBN 978-0-00-719576-3
• Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–65. Viking Press, 2013^[4]
• Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Assassination. Picador, 2021. ISBN 978-1-52-903013-6 ISBN 978-1-76-098619-3 ISBN 978-1-52-903015-0 ISBN 978-1-52-903014-3