Discover the Best Books Written by Peter Frank

Peter studied History at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was Foundation Scholar and Schiff Scholar and won the History Prize in 1993 when he took an outstanding first-class degree. He did his D.Phil (Ph.D.) at Corpus Christi College, where he was elected to a Senior Scholarship before moving to Worcester College as Junior Research Fellow in 1997. He has been Senior Research Fellow since 2000 and is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Royal Asiatic Society. 

Peter has held visiting Fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard) and Princeton and has lectured at universities all over the world, including Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, NYU, Notre Dame, King's London, and The Institute of Historical Research. He writes regularly for the national and international press about current affairs and about how history helps to explain the present. His work has been translated into twelve languages. 

Peter chairs a collection of family businesses in the UK, France, Croatia, and the Netherlands, including A Curious Group of Hotels, which he set up with his wife Jessica in 1999. He is actively involved with several charities, mainly in the areas of education, international development, gender studies, and classical music. Both he and Jessica are Companions of the Guild of Benefactors at Cambridge University. He has been a Governor of Wellington College since 2006. 

He chairs the Frankopan Fund, which has awarded more than a hundred scholarships and awards to outstanding young scholars from Croatia to study at leading academic institutions in the UK, USA, and Europe. A chorister at Westminster Cathedral as a boy, music scholar at school, and choral scholar at Cambridge, he is an accomplished musician. He has recorded many albums as a singer and instrumentalist. 

A keen sportsman, Peter won blues at both Oxford and Cambridge for minor sports and represented Croatia internationally in cricket. He plays for the Authors CC, a team of writers whose members has included PG Wodehouse and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In recent years, the team has toured India and Sri Lanka and played against the Pope's 1st XI - St Peter's CC - in England and in Rome. 

In the summer of 2013, Bloomsbury published The Authors XI. A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon. It was one of The Guardian's Books of the year and was one of Hilary Mantel's Books of the Year in the Observer.