David Boyle

David Boyle is a British author, historian, journalist and policy writer whose work ranges across medieval history, exploration, the world wars, economics and social change. He has edited several political and economic publications and has also been involved with organisations including the New Economics Foundation and the New Weather Institute. His historical writing is particularly broad: Blondel’s Song examines the capture and ransom of Richard the Lionheart; Toward the Setting Sun follows Columbus, Cabot and Vespucci in the European race across the Atlantic; Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma and Before Enigma explore British codebreaking; while Dunkirk: A Miracle of Deliverance, Munich 1938 and Peace on Earth: The Christmas Truce deal with major episodes of the two world wars.

Boyle has also written historical fiction. His Xanthe Schneider Enigma sequence—The Berlin Affair, The Athens Assignment and The Swiss Appointment—follows an American heroine involved with British naval intelligence and the struggle to break the German Enigma system during 1940–41. He later wrote Nor Shall My Sword Sleep and I, Caractacus, the latter presented as an imagined autobiography of the British ruler Caratacus during resistance to the Roman invasion. Boyle explicitly uses the novel to reconstruct a version of pre-Roman Britain where the surviving evidence is fragmentary, so it is best treated as historically inspired fiction rather than straightforward biography.