Charles Oman

Born in India in 1860, Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman became one of Britain's best-known military historians. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, later teaching at Oxford and eventually serving as Chichele Professor of Modern History.

Oman was especially admired for his work on battles and campaigning. He wrote influential studies including A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages and the monumental seven-volume A History of the Peninsular War. Readers and scholars valued the way he pieced together difficult, fragmentary sources to reconstruct how wars were actually fought.

Alongside his academic career, he also served in public life as a Conservative Member of Parliament. He died in 1946, but his histories remain notable for being both learned and highly readable.