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, in Germany at Leipzig University and at the Max Planck 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.
