Andrew Cook is a contemporary historian, researcher, TV consultant and broadcaster. He specialises in the nineteenth and twentieth century history, and is the author of 14 books that have been published in 7 languages.
In addition to books and research on political history topics, he has also specialised in social and cultural historical subjects such as post-war English league and international football, 19th and 20th century criminology, the history of the UK and US recording industries, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and an in-depth study of the record and sheet music sales charts. His latest book, Capitol Gains (released on 23rd October 2025), explores in depth the relationship between The Beatles and the Capitol record label, by drawing on record industry documents and interviews with those who worked for the company during the 1960s.
Formerly Programme Director of the Hansard Scholars Programme for the University of London, he has written for The Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Independent, Observer, BBC History Magazine, and History Today.
For the past 25 years Andrew has specialised in ‘closed record’ research, which began when he gained access to withheld records in Britain, Russia, Ukraine and the US while writing his first book on the international super-spy Sidney Reilly, the so-called Ace of Spies. He was only the fifth historian to be given special permission by the Cabinet Office, under the 1992 ‘Waldegrave Initiative’, to examine closed MI5 and MI6 documents not seen by any previous biographer of Reilly.
In 2006 he acted as a consultant to US authors Bill Kalush and Larry Sloman on their New York Times bestselling biography of Harry Houdini, and also contributed research to the official histories of MI5 and MI6, published in 2009 and 2010 respectively.
He has contributed to over 20 TV documentaries and films based on his books and research since the publication of his first book in 2002. The 2009 ‘The Real Goldfinger’ TV documentary, presented by James Bond star Honor Blackman, was based on new William Melville documents that came to light in 2007 about a German plot to blow up the gold vaults of the Bank of England. In the same year, he was granted Russian government permission to research in State and National Archives in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, where he uncovered new evidence about the captivity and death of the Russian Imperial family in 1918. This resulted in the book ‘The Murder of the Romanovs’. He returned to Russia the same year with a Channel 4 film crew to make the TV documentary ‘Three Kings at War’
In 2010 he gained exclusive access to over two thousand pages of closed file material held by Royal Mail and the Metropolitan Police, on the Great Train Robbery, variously closed for periods up to 2060. There followed three years of research, resulting in the 2013 publication of ‘The Great Train Robbery: The untold Story from the Closed Investigation Files’. This led to a Channel 4 TV documentary and the much-acclaimed Chris Chibnall films 'A Robber's Tale' and 'Copper's Tale' (2013), which starred Jim Broadbent, Luke Evans, James Fox, George Costigan, Paul Anderson, Robert Glenister, Martin Compston, and Jack Roth.
In 2013 his best-selling book ‘1963 – That Was the Year That Was’ was featured on BBC TV’s ‘Meet the Author’ programme. The ‘Ian Fleming Miscellany’ was published in 2015, based principally on previously unused research from the Sidney Reilly and William Melville projects and new, previously closed records.
In 2019 he took part in a second Channel 4 Great Train Robbery documentary, ‘The Missing Tapes’, which resulted in the Covid-delayed book ‘No Case to Answer: The Men who Got Away with The Great Train Robbery’ in 2022. Access to new MI14 intelligence material on the Gestapo, and the families of several key MI14 operatives, resulted in the book ‘Crimes of the Gestapo from the Closed Files of MI14’.
Andrew is also an experienced lecturer and speaker who has, over the past 20 years, spoken in the UK and internationally, to a wide variety of groups, societies and conferences on a range of historical topics.