FOLLY, Martin H(arold) 1957-

PERSONAL:

Born February 6, 1957, in Hackney, London, England; son of Alan (a publisher) and Marjorie (a secretary and homemaker; maiden name, Wood) Folly. Ethnicity: "English." Education: Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, B.A. (with honors), 1978; London School of Economics and Political Science, London, Ph.D., 1997. Politics: Labour. Religion: Church of England. Hobbies and other interests: Amateur drama (acting and directing), cricket.

ADDRESSES:

Home—1 Tash Pl., New Southgate, London N11 1PA, England. Office—Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 1EH, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, England, senior tutor for American studies, 1989—.

MEMBER:

British Association for American Studies, British International Studies Association, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

WRITINGS:

People in History (juvenile), Mitchell Beazley (London, England), 1988.

Churchill, Whitehall, and the Soviet Union, 1940-45, Macmillan Publishers (London, England), 2000.

Contributor to periodicals, including Review of International Studies, Diplomatic History, Journal of American Studies, and Diplomacy and Statecraft. Coeditor of the Internet journal Entertext.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

The United States in World War II, for Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland); research on Anglo-American Soviet relations in World War II.

SIDELIGHTS:

Martin H. Folly told CA: "I always loved history. As a ten-year-old I spent a lot of time reading up on the history of the London underground, so it was perhaps natural that I wound up as a historian. But I was also lucky to have schoolteachers who made history interesting and who were very encouraging about my juvenile writing.

"I was always drawn to World War II as a subject. Prime influences on that would be the classic World at War television series and all those Airfix models of my youth. Combine that with a longstanding interest in the Soviet Union and you get the inspiration for my studies. As I researched on Anglo-Soviet relations during the war, I became dissatisfied with the way our knowledge of what happened next causes us to view wartime events. How did they look at the time? Participants did not know what was going to happen, but they saw what had happened, and their anxiety to prevent a repetition of the desperate war they found themselves in needs to be restored to the center of our understanding of what they did. As I worked on the archives, so I became more interested in the titanic struggle of the Soviet peoples. One day I will write some more on that subject."