Angus Calder is an academic writer with a background in English literature, politics and cultural studies, who is also a historian and literary editor. He is a poet, and won the 1967 Gregory Award .

He read English literature at the University of Cambridge, and wrote a doctorate at the University of Sussex, on politics in the United Kingdom during World War II. His book The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 was published in 1969.

Revolutionary Empire (1981) studied three centuries of imperial development by English speakers, to the end of the eighteenth century. The Myth of the Blitz (1991) argued that received ideas of the civilian population's reaction to the bombing of London (1940/1, at its most intense) still reflected wartime propaganda.

He has resided in Scotland since 1971, working for 14 years there for the Open University. Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic is a collection of essays on Scottish topics; he has also worked as an editor of the prose of Hugh MacDiarmid.