The distinguished British military historian, Richard Holmes, has died after a battle with cancer. Having won a scholarship to read History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Holmes graduated and spent a year at Northern Illinois University, completing a PhD on the French army during the Second Empire before joining the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst as a lecturer in 1969. He went on to become deputy head of the Department of War Studies there. His biography of the Duke of Wellington, Wellington: The Iron Duke, was published in 2002, and was followed by an acclaimed documentary series of the same name. He had recently campaigned to preserve a key site from the Battle of Waterloo, the farmyard at Hougemont in Belgium, where the forces of the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon faced each other in June 1815.
Obituary on guardian.co.uk (external link)