Rodric Braithwaite was born in London in 1932: his father Warwick was then a conductor at Sadler’s Wells Opera. He was educated at Bedales, served in military intelligence in Vienna in 1951 and 1952, studied French and Russian at Cambridge, and joined the Diplomatic Service in 1955. He had postings in Jakarta, Warsaw, Moscow, Rome, Brussels (British delegation to the European Community) and Washington. He was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 1972-3. He was a member of the Sherpa team for the G7 Economic Summits (1984-8), British ambassador in Moscow (1988-1992), and Foreign Policy Adviser to Prime Minister Major and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (1992-3).

Since leaving government service, Rodric Braithwaite has been a Governor of the English National Opera, Chairman of the Royal Academy of Music, Senior Adviser to Deutsche Bank, and has had a number of other business and not-for-profit appointments. He is currently Chairman of the International Advisory Council of the Moscow School of Political Studies. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington for April-June 2005. He is on the governing bodies of the Ditchley Foundation and Wilton House,  an Honorary Fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge, and an Honorary Doctor and Professor of Birmingham University.

He regularly speaks and writes on Russia and other matters. He has written two books on Russian affairs: ”Across the Moscow River” (2002), about the collapse of the Soviet Union; and “Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War” (2006), which has appeared in seventeen languages. His latest book “Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989” is due to be published by Profile Books in March 2011.

He was married since 1961 to Jill (Gillian Robinson), an archaeologist and former diplomat, who died in November 2008. They have five children (one deceased).

(Current as of January 2010)