His Orthodox Jewish grandparents had immigrated to England from Poland and Lithuania (the original family name was Goldberg). 25, 1936, the first of two children of Peter Gilbert, a north London jeweller, and his wife, Miriam. 'He had been in a compromised condition due to an hypoxia brain injury in 2012,' she wrote in an e-mail. According to his wife, Esther Gilbert, he died of a sepsis infection. Sir Martin (he was knighted by the Queen in 1995) died in a London hospital Feb. He named his house outside Oxford the Map House. He also wrote about Russian history, Jewish history, the Holocaust, Israel, the two World Wars, and published a dozen map books including Atlas of the Holocaust, American History Atlas, Russian History Atlas, The Arab Israeli War: Its History in Maps, a form he pioneered and greatly enjoyed. Historian Simon Schama called the Churchill biography 'a great tidal wave of information' which you don't so much read as immerse yourself in. No piece of his voluminous research was wasted. At 32, he took over the huge task of writing the official biography of Sir Winston Churchill from Winston's son, Randolph Churchill, and almost half of his amazing output consists of the biography (six volumes by him, each more than 1,000 pages), its many companion volumes, and books that grew out of that project such as Churchill and the Jews, Churchill: A Photographic Portrait, and In Search of Churchill.

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