A graduate of Balliol College Oxford, Christopher Catherwood undertook postgraduate studies at Sidney Sussex College Cambridge and was awarded a Ph.D by publication at the University of Anglia, Norwich, on Churchill's creation of Iraq in 1921. Published as _Winston's Folly_, it became a bestseller in the USA as _Churchill's Folly_, and was translated into three other languages. As well as a period of teaching, Christopher was also the University of Richmond's History Department's Summer Writer in Residence, and became a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Virginia, and was elected a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow in 2010.