Born in 1940, is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary (University of London). In 1996 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, where he has run much of his teaching and research career. Along with John Pocock and John Dunn, is one of the leading exponents of the so-called Cambridge School, which has marked a whole new direction for understanding the political thought through the contextualization of the works in historical time in which they occurred and the desire to incardinar reasoning of each thinker in the specific scenario in which he argued. His books include: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), Machiavelli (1981), Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), Liberty before Liberalism (1998), Vision of Politics (2003) and Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008). He is editor, with Raymond Geus, of "Texts in the History of Political Thought" Cambridge collection. Received honorary doctorates from many universities and has been awarded prizes including Isaiah Berlin with the British Political Science Association.