Rhodri Jeffrey-Jones was born in Carmarthen in Wales and was a postdoc at Harvard after obtaining his Ph.D. from Cambridge University. He has been an anti-apartheid campaigner and radio and TV broadcaster. President of the Scottish Association for the Study of America, he writes about US social and intelligence history, his latest books being "In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence" (Oxford University Press, 2013) and "The American Left: Its Impact on Politics and Society since 1900" (Edinburgh and Oxford University Presses, winner of the Neustadt Prize for the best UK book on US politics published in 2013).