George Robert Acworth Conquest was born in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, England on July 15, 1917. He was educated at Winchester College in England, the University of Grenoble in France, and Magdalen College, Oxford University. During World War II, he joined the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. After studying Bulgarian, he served as an intelligence officer in Bulgaria, where he remained after the war as the press officer at the British Embassy in Sofia. He started out as a poet. He edited volumes of the poetry anthology New Lines, which showcased work by Movement poets. His poetry collections included Between Mars and Venus and Arias from a Love Opera. He also edited Spectrum, a series of five anthologies that presented quality science-fiction stories from the 1940s and 1950s. His science-fiction works included A World of Difference and The Egyptologists written with Kingsley Amis. He is best known as a historian who documented the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet regime against its own citizens. He wrote numerous books on the Soviet system and politics including Power and Politics in the USSR, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Russia After Khrushchev, Industrial Workers in the USSR, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities, and Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps. He died from pneumonia on August 3, 2015 at the age of 98.