Michael Fry is active in three aspects of modern Scotland: politics, journalism and scholarship. He has written for many newspapers in Britain and abroad and is the author of works on the political, religious and intellectual history of Scotland, including the monumental The Scottish Empire. He lives in Edinburgh and is currently working on a new study of the Highland Clearances.
Michael Fry was educated at Oxford and Hamburg Universities. He has held academic positions in Scotland at Strathclyde and Edinburgh Universities, in the US at Brown University, and in Germany at Leipzig University and the Max Franck Institute, Frankfurt. He is the author of ten books on modern Scottish history, including The Dundas Despotism (1993), The Scottish Empire (2001), Wild Scots, Four Hundred Years of Highland History (2005) and Edinburgh, a History of the City (2009). He has contributed to most major Scottish and British newspapers, and has been a regular columnist for The Scotsman, the Herald and The Sunday Times.