Short answers, pulled from the story.
Martin Gilbert wrote 88 books. His output included the multi-volume official biography of Winston Churchill, single-volume histories of the First and Second World Wars, a history of the Holocaust, and works on Soviet Jewry and Jewish history in Muslim lands.
Gilbert's biography of Winston Churchill runs to 28 volumes and exceeds 30,000 pages, with three further document volumes still planned at the time of his death. The first two volumes were written by Randolph Churchill; Gilbert completed the remaining six main volumes after Randolph died in 1968.
Gilbert was appointed to the Iraq War inquiry headed by Sir John Chilcot in June 2009. William Hague, Clare Short, and George Galloway objected on grounds of neutrality, pointing to a 2004 article in which Gilbert suggested George W. Bush and Tony Blair might one day be regarded as highly as Churchill and Roosevelt. Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, separately criticized Gilbert's Jewish background and Zionist sympathies in an article published in November 2009.
In the early 1960s, Hungary's State Protection Authority attempted to recruit Gilbert as an agent. He accepted a government-funded trip to Budapest in September 1961 but did not attend a follow-up meeting in Paris, and the Hungarians abandoned the effort after his intended handler defected to the West. The Hungarian historian Krisztian Ungvary, writing in 2015, suggested Gilbert may have been working with British intelligence to plant a double agent.
Gilbert was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990 and received a knighthood in 1995 for services to British history and international relations. The University of Oxford awarded him a Doctor of Letters in 1999 for the totality of his published work, and he won the Dan David Prize in 2012 for his contribution to history and biography.
From 1962, Gilbert worked as part of Randolph Churchill's research team in Suffolk, helping produce the first two volumes of the Churchill biography while also pursuing his own research at Oxford. When Randolph died in 1968, Gilbert was commissioned to take over the project entirely, ultimately completing the remaining six main volumes himself over the following 20 years.