Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire

Hugh Thomas is the author of, among other books, The Spanish Civil War (1962) which won the Somerset Maugham Award, Conquest- Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico (1994), An Unfinished History of the World (1979) and The Slave Trade (1997). From 1966 to 1975 he was Professor of History at the University of Reading. He was Director of the Centre for Policy Studies in London from 1979 to 1991, and he became a life peer as Baron Thomas of Swynnerton in 1981.