A full member of the Royal Academy of History since 2014, he was Professor of Contemporary History at the Complutense University of Madrid. Specialising in the Contemporary History of Spain, and especially in the Basque Country and nationalisms, he obtained a PhD in History from the University of Oxford (1974) and in Philosophy and Arts (History) from the Complutense University (1979). He was director of the Centre for Iberian Studies at St. Antony’s College (Oxford), 1976-1979, and Professor of Contemporary History at the Universities of Murcia, Cantabria and the Basque Country, 1982-1988. After being appointed Doctor of Humanities, Honoris Causa by the University of New York (NUY, 15 Dec. 1987), he was director of the National Library between 1986 and 1990. A decade later, between 2001 and 2006, he was Academic Director of the Ortega y Gasset University Research Institute and the Ortega y Gasset Foundation. He published more than one hundred articles in magazines and book chapters, supervised around twenty doctoral theses, and is the author of more than thirty books. He received prestigious awards for this fruitful research work, including: Espejo de España Award (with Raymond Carr), 1979; Montaigne European Essay Award, 2000; Julián Marías Award for Humanities, Community of Madrid, 2008; Lan Onari Award, Basque Government, 2011. In addition to being a member of the RAH, he has also been a member of the Jakiunde, the Basque Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters since 2011.