About the Author

Hi there!

I'm John — and I blame my dad for all of this.

When I was about seven, I was handed down an old paper map, The Daily Telegraph Map of the World, probably from my dad or one of my uncles. I didn't know it at the time, but it had been printed not long after the Second World War, so as far as I was concerned, that was simply what the world looked like. One afternoon Dad and I were poring over it while he told me about the different countries, and we landed on a big pink one called Persia. "Of course," he said, "it's not called Persia anymore. It's Iran now."

That stopped me in my tracks. A country could just change its name? When I later compared the old map with a modern one, I found it wasn't only Persia. Much of the world had been redrawn and renamed, and it has changed again several times since. I wanted to know how that happens, and why: who decides, and what goes on in between. I've been chasing that question, in one form or another, ever since. It's what first drew me to history, and in a roundabout way, it's behind every book on this site.

I was born in Glasgow, Scotland, which is a genuinely unfair place to spend your early childhood if you're the kind of kid who's going to grow up obsessed with the past — castles, battlefields, and the odd ghost story are just sort of lying around. But I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and it was here that I figured out my obsession with history wasn't just a weird excuse to avoid the present. It was the whole plot.

By the time I hit my pre-teens I was reading nonfiction history voraciously — anything I could get my hands on. In high school, I liked it so much I once talked enough classmates into signing up for Year 12 History just so we'd hit the school's 9-person minimum to run the subject at all. (If any of you are reading this: sorry, and you're welcome). Once I'd worked through the standard curriculum — the stuff every Australian kid gets fed — I went looking for the history nobody assigns: South American history, Canadian history, African history. Turns out the interesting stuff doesn't stop at the edges of the textbook.

I left Monash University with a double major in History and Writing, which proved, once and for all, that spending your entire twenties lost in archives can technically be called "productive." I'm drawn mostly to modern history — depending who you ask, that starts with the French Revolution in 1789 or the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and honestly I'll take either fight. I've also got a long-running fascination with the history of politics itself — how power actually gets organised — which is what led me to write The Democracy Divide, on the tangled history of parliamentary versus presidential democracy.

Here's the thing that keeps me doing this: so much of what we're taught about history is either cliché, boring, or just plain wrong. Real history is full of drama, ego, accident, and people making terrible decisions for very human reasons — and I'd like to think that in some small way, my books put that back in.

These days I live in Melbourne's eastern suburbs with my family and our spoodle, Bodhi, who listens patiently to my historical musings on our daily walks and has never once told me to get to the point. When I'm not buried in research or writing, I'm probably wondering whether I was born in the wrong century — though I'll admit, modern plumbing has its charms.

If any of that sounds like your kind of rabbit hole, [sign up here →] and I'll send you a free chapter to get started.