Simon Tolkien is the grandson of JRR Tolkien and a director of the Tolkien Estate. He studied Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford and went on to become a London barrister specializing in criminal defense. He left the law to become a writer in 2001 and has written five novels which mine the history of the first half of the last century to explore dark subjects – capital punishment, the Holocaust, the London Blitz and the Battle of the Somme. He is now working on a book about American volunteers who sacrificed so much for their ideals in the Spanish Civil War.