The official website of writer

Welcome!

'Writing is like art or sculpture: you start with blank paper; you then have to chip and chisel to get the words, balance and subject matter right.'
Victoria Schofield talking to Dawn Newspaper, Karachi, 16 August 2000, Books and Authors

Welcome to my website. My writing career began in my third year at Oxford University when my first article was published in Blackwood’s Magazine; together with four other students, I’d been selected to participate in a ‘study tour’ of South Africa, where we witnessed the divisive nature of  the apartheid regime just after the 1976 Soweto riots. From Africa,  my attention was directed to South Asia. Benazir Bhutto was a  friend and contemporary at Oxford, and when her father, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was put on trial for conspiracy to murder a political opponent and condemned to death in 1978, I put my fledging ambition to write professionally into a higher gear by travelling to Islamabad to cover his appeal against the death sentence.

The fruits of my endeavours were several articles in  The Spectator and my first book,  Bhutto: Trial and Execution. Since then, I’ve remained dedicated to understanding more about South Asian politics, both as a historian and journalist, and have travelled widely in the region.  The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 provided the inspiration for another book, Every Rock, Every Hill: The Plain Tale of the North-West Frontier and Afghanistan, which I’ve recently revised as Afghan Frontier: Feuding and Fighting in Central Asia and now as Afghan Frontier: At the Crossroads of Conflict. I’ve also written extensively about the insurgency in the Indian administered part of Jammu and Kashmir in articles and books, (Kashmir in the Crossfire (1996) and Kashmir in Conflict (2000 and 2002).) When working freelance for the BBC World Service in London and New York during the 1980s and 1990s, I covered numerous other stories, including a feature on British sculptor, Henry Moore and a radio series on  ‘Women of the French Revolution’.

My first biography, Wavell:Soldier and Statesman (2006),  combines a lifelong interest in military history with my knowledge of the subcontinent. I have also written the life of military historian and royal biographer, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett. I am currently working on an official history of The Black Watch.