Cannadine heads back

David Cannadine, one of the highest profile historians to have joined the brain drain to the United States, is to return to Britain in 1998.

Professor Cannadine, 46, currently Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University, New York has been appointed as the next director of London University's Institute of Historical Research, succeeding Patrick O'Brien on his retirement in May 1998.

He said he was "thrilled and excited" by the appointment to the Senate House-based institute, an intellectual and a social centre for historians in London and the surrounding areas. Appointment to a London post completes a "golden triangle" set. He took a first degree from Cambridge and a doctorate from Oxford and before moving to the United States in 1988, he was a fellow of Christ's, Cambridge. A prominent and often acidulous reviewer in the national press and the weeklies - with a strong taste for polished but devastating one-liners, his own best-known work was the vast, sprawling Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1989). He is currently working on a history of the monarchy.