false 57922 2 1
Thomas was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset before taking a BA in 1953 at Queens' College, Cambridge. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. His 1961 book The Spanish Civil War won the Somerset Maugham Award for 1962. A significantly revised and enlarged third edition was published in 1977. Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (1971) is a book of over 1,500 pages tracing the history of Cuba from Spanish colonial rule until the Cuban Revolution. Thomas spent 10 years researching the contents of his book.

Thomas is married to the former Vanessa Jebb, daughter of the first Acting United Nations Secretary-General Gladwyn Jebb.

From 1966 to 1975 Thomas was Professor of History at the University of Reading. He was Director of the Centre for Policy Studies in London from 1979 to 1991, as an ally of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He became a life peer as Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, of Notting Hill in Greater London in letters patent dated 16 June 1981. He has written pro-European political works, as well as histories. He is also the author of three novels.

Thomas's The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 "begins with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, before Columbus's voyage to the New World, and ends with the last gasp of the slave trade, long since made illegal elsewhere, in Cuba and Brazil, twenty-five years after the American Emancipation Proclamation," according to the summary on the book jacket.

Thomas should not be confused with two other historical writers: W. Hugh Thomas writes about Nazi Germany and Hugh M. Thomas is an American who writes on English history.]]> male 1931/10/21 342827 0671511041 9780671511043 13 <![CDATA[Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173900100m/342827.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173900100s/342827.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342827.Conquest_Montezuma_Cortes_and_the_Fall_of_Old_Mexico 4.17 59 THE UNPARALLELED HISTORY OF THE FALL OF OLD MEXICO

Drawing on newly discovered sources and writing with brilliance, drama, and profound historical insight, Hugh Thomas presents an engrossing narrative of one of the most significant events of Western history.

Ringing with the fury of two great empires locked in an epic battle, Conquest captures in extraordinary detail the Mexican and Spanish civilizations and offers unprecedented in-depth portraits of the legendary opponents, Montezuma and Cortés. Conquest is an essential work of history from one of our most gifted historians.

]]> 57922 4.02 199 40 1993 309382 0141011610 9780141011615 4 <![CDATA[The Spanish Civil War]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173618617m/309382.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173618617s/309382.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/309382.The_Spanish_Civil_War 4.25 36 57922 4.02 199 40 1961 178472 0684835657 9780684835655 5 <![CDATA[The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172461931m/178472.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172461931s/178472.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178472.The_Slave_Trade_The_Story_of_the_Atlantic_Slave_Trade_1440_1870 3.91 23 The Slave Trade is a massive (900-page) book that attempts to document the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade, a sordid business that somehow prospered for more than four centuries. As the sheer heft of the book might indicate, the story is complicated. Much of the extensive research conducted by Hugh Thomas relates to rivalries both in Europe and Africa. Those who wonder how slavery could have existed in the United States may find revelatory the moral ambiguity of how the business of transporting slaves was conducted.]]> 57922 4.02 199 40 1997 751645 0812970551 9780812970555 5 <![CDATA[Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire from Columbus to Magellan]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178037869m/751645.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178037869s/751645.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/751645.Rivers_of_Gold_The_Rise_of_the_Spanish_Empire_from_Columbus_to_Magellan 3.53 19
Hugh Thomas shows Spain at the dawn of the sixteenth century as a world power on the brink of greatness. Her monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, had retaken Granada from Islam, thereby completing restoration of the entire Iberian peninsula to Catholic rule. Flush with success, they agreed to sponsor an obscure Genoese sailor’s plan to sail west to the Indies, where, legend purported, gold and spices flowed as if they were rivers. For Spain and for the world, this decision to send Christopher Columbus west was epochal—the dividing line between the medieval and the modern.

Spain’s colonial adventures began inauspiciously: Columbus’s meagerly funded expedition cost less than a Spanish princess’s recent wedding. In spite of its small scale, it was a mission of astounding scope: to claim for Spain all the wealth of the Indies. The gold alone, thought Columbus, would fund a grand Crusade to reunite Christendom with its holy city, Jerusalem.

The lofty aspirations of the first explorers died hard, as the pursuit of wealth and glory competed with the pursuit of pious impulses. The adventurers from Spain were also, of course, curious about geographical mysteries, and they had a remarkable loyalty to their country. But rather than bridging earth and heaven, Spain’s many conquests bore a bitter fruit. In their search for gold, Spaniards enslaved “Indians” from the Bahamas and the South American mainland. The eloquent protests of Bartolomé de las Casas, here much discussed, began almost immediately. Columbus and other Spanish explorers—Cortés, Ponce de León, and Magellan among them—created an empire for Spain of unsurpassed size and scope. But the door was soon open for other powers, enemies of Spain, to stake their claims.
Great men and women dominate these pages: cardinals and bishops, priors and sailors, landowners and warriors, princes and priests, noblemen and their determined wives.

Rivers of Gold is a great story brilliantly told. More significant, it is an engrossing history with many profound—often disturbing—echoes in the present.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 57922 4.02 199 40 2003 223768 0306808277 9780306808272 1 <![CDATA[Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172854533m/223768.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172854533s/223768.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223768.Cuba_The_Pursuit_of_Freedom 4.11 9 57922 4.02 199 40 1971 2684301 1844137430 9781844137435 0 <![CDATA[The Conquest of Mexico]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2684301.The_Conquest_of_Mexico 4.25 4 57922 4.02 199 40 1993 2684309 0333627997 9780333627990 0 <![CDATA[An Unfinished History of the World]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2684309.An_Unfinished_History_of_the_World 4.00 1 57922 4.02 199 40 1979 642653 156656591X 9781566565912 0 <![CDATA[A Traveller's Companion to Madrid]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176665342m/642653.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176665342s/642653.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/642653.A_Traveller_s_Companion_to_Madrid 4.00 1 Includes: the Duke of Wellington walking in the shady Paseo del Prado; the Earl of Clarendon on 17th-century bullfights; Salvador Dal° playing a surrealist joke on a snooty barman at the Ritz; Rubens in the AlcÝzar; Manet at the Prado, generals and anarchists in the Puerta del Sol; Casanova and Trotsky in prison.

]]> 57922 4.02 199 40 2005 366421 0300121032 9780300121032 0 <![CDATA[Beaumarchais in Seville: An Intermezzo]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174153836m/366421.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174153836s/366421.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/366421.Beaumarchais_in_Seville_An_Intermezzo 4.00 1 The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, plays that became the basis for the operas by Rossini and Mozart that continue to delight audiences today. This book is a lively and original account of Beaumarchais’s visit to Madrid (he never went to Seville) and a re-creation of the society that fired his imagination.
Drawing on Beaumarchais’s letters and commentaries, translated into English for the first time, Hugh Thomas investigates the full range of the playwright’s activities in Madrid. He focuses particular attention on short plays that Beaumarchais attended and by which he was probably influenced, and he probes the inspirations for such widely recognized characters as the barber-valet Figaro, the lordly Count Almaviva, and the beautiful but deceived Rosine. Not neglecting Beaumarchais’s many other pursuits (ranging from an endeavor to gain a contract for selling African slaves to an attempt to place his mistress as a spy in the bed of King Charles III), Lord Thomas provides a highly entertaining view of a vital moment in Madrid’s history and in the creative life of the energetic Beaumarchais.</div>]]> 57922 4.02 199 40 2007 5093785 0 <![CDATA[Spain]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5093785.Spain 3.00 1 57922 4.02 199 40 1962