Blair Worden
Alastair Blair Worden, FBA (born 12 January 1945), usually known by his middle name Blair, is a historian, among the leading authorities on the period of the English Civil War and on relations between literature and history more generally in the early modern period. He matriculated as an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1963. After spending a year as a visiting student at Harvard he began graduate research at Oxford in 1967. After a period as a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, teaching History, he took up a position as a Professor at Royal Holloway, University  of London. In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1999 he delivered the British Academy's Raleigh Lecture on History. As of 2011 he is an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall. He is well known for his revolutionary article "Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan", which changed established historical perceptions about what exactly caused Oliver Cromwell to reject the offer of the Crown.