Andrew Thorpe

Andrew Thorpe (born 1962) is a British historian. He is Professor of Modern History and (from 2004-2007) was Head of History at the University of Exeter, where he is now Director of Research for Humanities and Social Sciences.

He is a noted historian on the British Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain particularly in the era of the Communist International, having been one of the few foreign, non-party historians to have had access to archives at Moscow following the fall of the Soviet Union.

January 2009 saw the publication of Professor Thorpe's new work entitled Parties at War, which examined all the major parties in Britain during the Second World War. The subject of the book has been the topic of his taught undergraduate module of the same name at the University of Exeter and is the product of over five years research.

Currently Professor Thorpe is working on the biography of Labour leader and Nobel prize winner Arthur Henderson.

• The British general election of 1931, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991
• Britain in the 1930s: the deceptive decade, Oxford: Blackwell/Historical Association, 1992
• The Longman Companion to Britain in the Era of the World Wars, 1914-1945, London: Longman, 1993
• A History of the British Labour Party, London: Macmillan, 1997
• Britain 1916-1940, Bedford: Sempringham Press, 1998
• The British Communist Party and the Communist International, 1919-1943, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000
• A History of the British Labour Party (2nd edition), London: Palgrave, 2001
• Parties at War: Political organization in Second World War Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009