- Two-Year Fellow, All Souls College (2015)
- Professor of Modern Italian History, University of Reading (from 2002 to 2015)
- Director, Centre for Italian History (from 1987 to 2015)
- Lecturer, then Reader, University of Reading (from 1987 to 2002)
- Post-Doctoral Research, then Fifty-Pound, Fellow, All Souls College (from 1985 to 1997)
- Postgraduate, Merton College, Wolfson College, Oxford (from 1981 to 1985)
- Undergraduate, Merton College, Oxford (from 1976 to 1979)
- Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Italian history
- Fascist Voices. An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy (Bodley Head, 2012)
- The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (Allen Lane, 2007)
- Francesco Crispi. From Nation to Nationalism (OUP, 2002)
- A Concise History of Italy (CUP, 1994)
- Fascism and the mafia (Yale University Press, 1989)
- (co-edited with M.I. Finley and D. Mack Smith (eds)), A History of Sicily (Chatto and Windus, 1986)
