23 - 29 June 2025 - Broad Chalke, Salisbury
Simon Mayall was commissioned into the British Army in 1979. Over the next decades he served in Germany, Belgium, the UK and Oman, and was deployed on operations in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the Balkans and the Middle East. He commanded soldiers at all levels and held a series of increasingly senior staff appointments in the Ministry of Defence, including Assistant Chief of the General Staff, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Operations), and Defence Senior Adviser Middle East. In between periods of Command and Staff training, he undertook a Defence Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and an MA in International Relations at King’s College. He was knighted in 2014, and retired from the Army in 2015.Since retirement, Mayall has sought to combine his academic enthusiasm for history, with his own personal and professional experience in the Middle East, in order develop an expertise in this complex and volatile region. His book Soldier in the Sand, a Personal History of the Modern Middle East was published in 2020. In 2024 he published The House of War: The Struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate.
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