Barney White-Spunner has written extensively about country sports, as a correspondent for THE FIELD since 1992 and editor of BAILY'S HUNTING DIRECTORY, and its associated stable of publications, since 1994. In 1995 he was the Deputy Leader of the joint Chinese British Taklamakan Expedition, which made the first crossing of the Taklamakan desert from west to east, whilst revisiting many of the sites originally discovered by Sir Aurel Stein on the silk routes. A serving Major General in the British Army, he commanded the NATO operation to disarm the Albanian factions in Macedonia in 2001 and the Kabul Multi National Brigade, charged with security in Kabul following the fall of the Taliban, in 2002. He was also Chief of Staff of British Forces in the Middle East during the Iraq War, and ran the military relief operations for the Tsumami. HORSE GUARDS, his history of the Household Cavalry, in which he has served since he was nineteen, is to be published by Pan Macmillan, and accompanies a BBC1 series of the same name.

Born in 1957, married to Moo who runs a chain of Montessori Schools, and with three children, he lives in Dorset.