Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

Nicholas Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (born 5 March 1955) is a British writer. He trained as a barrister before becoming a journalist and then a non-fiction writer. His second book "Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man" was published in 2006 (by Viking in the UK: ISBN 0-670-91082-1, and by Harvard University Press in the US: ISBN 978-0-674-02439-7). His cousin Denzil was a platoon commander at Dunkirk.^[1]

His previous book is Enigma: The Battle for the Code, the story of breaking the German Enigma machine code at Bletchley Park^[2] during World War II (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000). His family owned Bletchley Park until they sold it to the British government in 1938.

His brother Simon Sebag Montefiore is also a writer, besides being an historian.

Family history

Montefiore's father, Stephen Eric Sebag-Montefiore, was descended from a line of wealthy Sephardic Jews who were diplomats and bankers all over Europe. At the start of the 19th century, his great-great uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore, became a banking partner of N M Rothschild & Sons. His mother, Phyllis April Jaffé comes from a Lithuanian Jewish family of poor scholars. Her parents fled the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century. They bought tickets for New York City, but were cheated, being instead dropped off at Cork, Ireland. During the Limerick Pogrom of 1904 they left Ireland and moved to Newcastle, England. The father of his namesake, Bishop of Birmingham Hugh Montefiore, was the great-great-nephew of Sir Moses.

References

External links

• International Herald Tribune Review of Enigma
• Times article on Dunkirk
• Daily Telegraph review of Dunkirk
• Andrew Roberts review of Dunkirk in the New York Sun