and verve...in one great canvas of immense detail and beauty...transnational history at its finest." Dominic Sandbrook, in the Sunday Times, described it as "dazzlingly erudite and entertaining." It has been, or is being translated into Dutch, Spanish, German, Greek, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese and Italian. He has written a biography on the historian Eric Hobsbawm entitled 'Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History'. From 2013 to 2018 he was Principal Investigator in a £1.6 million Leverhulme Programme Grant on conspiracy theories (conspiracyanddemocracy.org) and is preparing work based on the findings of the project. Regius Professor of Modern History In 2008, Evans was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge (in 2010 the word "Modern" was removed from the title by royal decree). The post is a royal appointment in the gift of the Prime Minister of the day and dates back to 1724. Previous holders of the title have included John Dalberg-Acton (1895), Herbert Butterfield (1963), Geoffrey Elton (1983), Patrick Collinson (1988) and Quentin Skinner (1998). Evans is the first historian to have to apply for the post and be interviewed by a Board of Electors, including Cambridge's Vice-Chancellor, Alison Richard, and representatives of the history faculty and the university, as well as external assessors from Yale, Harvard, Oxford and London. The board selected a shortlist of four, each of whom was asked to give a presentation to the entire Cambridge history faculty. The shortlist of four was then reduced to two, whom the board interviewed, resulting in the board's recommendation of Evans to the Prime Minister and in the issue of a Royal Warrant for his appointment. As well as serving as Regius Professor, Evans served as chairman of the history faculty from October 2008 to 30 September 2010. Evans is used to combining administration with research. At Birkbeck College, London, where he worked before Cambridge, he acted as Master of the college when Baroness Blackstone left suddenly to become Tony Blair's first higher education minister. On 27 January 2010 he was elected to the position of President of Wolfson College, Cambridge, serving the statutory seven-year term of office until retiring from the post on 30 September 2017. During this period he focused on building up the college as a centre of contemporary culture, with art exhibitions by Richard Deacon and Anthony Green, and talks by Martin Amis and Neil MacGregor, among many others. In 2014