Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of numerous books on the former Soviet Union and its demise, including The Gorbachev Factor (1996, also published by Oxford University Press) and The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009), both of which won both the Alec Nove Prize and the Political Studies Association's W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize for best politics book of the year. A leading authority on Mikhail Gorbachev, he was the first person to draw Margaret Thatcher's attention to Gorbachev (at a 1983 Chequers seminar) as a reform-minded likely future Soviet leader.