Hugh Small is a social historian and political economist with a long previous career in industry after graduating from Durham University with honours in physics and psychology.

From 1976 to 1981 Hugh Small was the principal network architect for the world's first commercial internet, the SITA multi-airline reservations network. From 1983 to 1998 he was a partner in two US strategic management consulting firms, Arthur D. Little and A.T. Kearney.

In 1998 he changed career and began to research social reform in Victorian Britain. His historical publications include Florence Nightingale, Avenging Angel (Constable, 1998) and The Crimean War (Tempus Publishing, 2007). His final revised biography of Florence Nightingale will be published in the summer of 2017 by Robinson, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group. It reveals new evidence that Nightingale implemented the sanitation revolution which academics now agree was the cause of the astonishing increase in national life expectancy which began in the 1870s. This activity had nothing to do with the hospital nursing reforms with which Nightingale has been traditionally associated.

Hugh Small is a widower with two daughters and five grandchildren. His website is [...]