Alan Palmer

Alan Warwick Palmer (28 September 1926 – 25 March 2022) was a British author of popular historical and biographical books. A number of these books were translated into other languages.

Palmer was educated at Bancroft's School, Woodford Green, London, and Oriel College, Oxford. He spent 19 years as senior history teacher at Highgate School before becoming a full-time writer and researcher. His late wife, Veronica Palmer collaborated on several of his books.

The historian Martin Gilbert was a pupil of Palmer's at Highgate, and contributed a foreword to a 2003 reprinting of his book Napoleon in Russia stating: "Alan Palmer is one of my favourite historians. I have read all his thirty plus books, and have learned from them all. His reference works serve as models of clarity and presentation... how lucky we schoolboys were to have a working historian as our teaching historian".

Palmer died on 25 March 2022, at the age of 95.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1980.