One Minute With: Saul David, historian

Where are you now and what can you see?

I'm in my little writing hut in my Somerset home, looking down a sloping meadow which has a pond at the end.

What are you currently reading?

As ever, I've got multiple books on the go. The one I'm most concentrating on is Peter Englund's brilliant history, 'The Beauty and the Sorrow'. It is a collection of disparate accounts of the First World War from people living all over the world, and it corrects the Western view that most of the key fighting was done on the Western Front.

Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

The historian, Professor Hew Strachan, at Oxford University, who was my mentor. He got me into military history and unlike an awful lot of historians, who don't seem to be able to keep partiality or politics out of their work, he is able to do so. It's incredibly difficult to do, I think, but you never think for a moment when reading him that he has anything other than a distant, objective view....