Alexander William Kinglake was an English travel writer and historian. He was born near Taunton, Somerset, and educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was called to the Bar in 1837, and built up a thriving legal practice, which, in 1856, he abandoned to devote himself to literature and public life. His magnum opus was an eight-volume history of the Crimean War, The Invasion of the Crimea, though he is better known as the author of Eothen.
