Christopher Harvie was born in 1944 in then-industrial Motherwell, and brought up in the Scottish Borders, to which he has now returned, to look after his near-centenarian parents. The author of fifteen books about the European, British, and Scottish past and contemporary affairs, he was a founder-historian at the Open University in 1969, and taught at the historic University of Tuebingen from 1980-2007. Associated with Gordon Brown in the frustrated devolution campaign of the 1970s, he served as an SNP member of the Scottish Parliament 2007-11 and as adviser to Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. The HERALD newspaper voted him its 'Free Spirit of Parliament' in 2008, and the Berlin government gave him its Bundesverdienstkreuz in 2012.
