After growing up in the North-East Derbyshire town of Dronfield, Andrew Thorpe took first class honours in Medieval and Modern History at the University of Birmingham in 1983. He then researched his PhD on 'The British general election of 1931' at the University of Sheffield under the supervision of Dr John Stevenson. He was appointed Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter in 1987, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1996. In 2002 he was appointed Professor of Modern British History at the age of 40. He was Head of Exeter's History Department between 2004 and 2007. He is the author of numerous books, articles and chapters on aspects of British political history in the twentieth century, and was one of the first British scholars to make use of the Moscow archives of the British Communist party when they were opened up in the early 1990s. That same commitment to using lesser-known or under-used sources was one of the considerations that led him to write Parties at War.