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All three of this year's prizewinners, who were named at a ceremony in London on Tuesday, have a Cambridge connection. Dr Adam Tooze and Dr Chris Clark are both current staff members in the Faculty of History, while the other winner, Professor Vic Gatrell, is a life fellow of Gonville and Caius College.

̽��ֱ��prizes are awarded for excellence in the writing of history for the general public. ̽��ֱ��2007 recipients join an illustrious list of previous winners, among them Sir Michael Howard, Norman Stone, Simon Schama, Quentin Skinner, Antonia Fraser, Eric Hobsbawm, David Reynolds and Christopher Bayly.

Just two or three awards are made each year by a panel of judges on behalf of the Wolfson Foundation – a charitable foundation that awards grants to back excellence in several fields, including the arts and humanities. There are normally about 150 nominees, all of whom have published a new book in history during the last calendar year. To win, their writing has to be deemed both scholarly, and accessible to the lay reader.

̽��ֱ��first prize this year was awarded to Dr Tooze for his book ‘ ̽��ֱ��Wages of Destruction', a study of the inner workings of Hitler's Nazi Empire. ̽��ֱ��book has been described by fellow historian Professor Niall Ferguson as: “One of the most important and original books to be published about the Third Reich in the past twenty years.”

Dr Clark and Professor Gatrell received join second prizes. Dr Clark's book, ‘Iron Kingdom', is a new history of the rise and fall of Prussia, while Professor Gatrell's ‘City Of Laughter' is an acclaimed scholarly examination of 18th-century caricatures.