About the Author

Hugh Thomas is the author of, among other books, The Spanish Civil War (1961), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Suez Affair (1967), Cuba- The Pursuit of Freedom (1971), An Unfinished History of the World (1979), Armed Truce (1986), Conquest- Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico (1994), The Slave Trade (1997) and the first two volumes of his Spanish Empire trilogy, Rivers of Gold (2003) and The Golden Age (2010). From 1966 to 1976 he was Professor of History at the University of Reading, and from 1979 to 1991 chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies in London. In 2008 he was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) and won the Gabarr n Prize; he received the Calvo Serer Prize, the Boccaccio Prize and the Nonino Prize in Italy in 2009. He is a member of the Academia de Buenas Letras in Seville and a Caballero of the Maestranza of Ronda, and in 1981 became a life peer as Lord Thomas of Swynnerton.

Reviews

This is history as it used to be: adventurous men (and a few women), masses of action, little analysis but racy gossip and colourful scene setting. We could often be reading one of the tales the colonists themselves sent back
*Daily Telegraph*

Literary power is a vital part of a great historian's armoury. As in his earlier books, Thomas demonstrates here that he has this in abundance. But equally important is [his] sense of perspective ... With all its flaws, Thomas argues, the Spanish Empire left an extraordinarily rich legacy
*Financial Times*

World Without End is full of illuminating detail, drawn from painstaking work
*Economist*