Noel Malcolm studied History and English Literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He began his career as a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; he was then political columnist and, subsequently, Foreign Editor of the Spectator. In 1999 he was a lecturer at Harvard and gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford in 2001. Since 2002 he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and at Cambridge an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Gonville and Caius. He was knighted in 2014 for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.