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Michael Bloch is a British writer and historian. He read law at St John’s College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar by the Inner Temple.

He worked during the 1980s for Maître Suzanne Blum, the Paris lawyer of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and wrote six books about the couple.  His edition of the Windsors’ love letters, published after the Duchess’s death in 1986 under the title Wallis & Edward, topped the Sunday Times best-seller list in the UK and was the Book-of-the-Month Club main selection in America.

His biography of Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, published by Transworld in 1992 and reissued by Abacus in 2003, was chosen by Hugh Trevor-Roper as his Book of the Year in the Sunday Telegraph.

An intimate friend of James Lees-Milne, the writer and architectural conservationist, he edited five volumes of his diary and wrote his biography. He has also written the life of the Australian actor Frederick Matthias Alexander, founder of the Alexander Technique.

His definitive biography of Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal Party leader whose career spectacularly ended amid a murder scandal, received enormous critical acclaim on its publication in 2014.  He has also written a play about Thorpe, Getting Away With It.

His latest book, Closet Queens (2015), a study of twentieth-century gay British politicians, was hailed by Nicholas Shakespeare as ‘hugely entertaining’ and by D. R. Thorpe as ‘an original and necessary account, breaking new ground’.