After reading History at Cambridge, John Hussey spent 30 years working for BP around the world including the Congo in the 1960s and Nigeria in the 1970s. He was awarded an OBE in 1971. He has written many articles on British military history, mainly on the Napoleonic and First World Wars, and served as a member of the International Historical Committee for the restoration of the Waterloo Battlefield. He is the author of Malborough: Hero of Blenheim (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004) and is a Fellow of the Royal Historial Society.