Simon Mayall was commissioned into the British Army in 1979, having graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. Over the next decades he served in Germany, Belgium, the UK and Oman, and was deployed on operations in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the Balkans and the Middle East. He commanded soldiers at all levels and held a series of increasingly senior staff appointments in the Ministry of Defence, including Assistant Chief of the General Staff, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Operations), and Defence Senior Adviser Middle East. In between periods of Command and Staff training, he undertook a Defence Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and an MA in International Relations at King’s College. He was knighted in 2014, and retired from the Army in 2015.

Since retirement, Mayall has sought to combine his academic enthusiasm for history, with his own personal and professional experience in the Middle East, in order develop an expertise in this complex and volatile region. As a result, he is routinely called upon for commentary or analysis, using his deep knowledge of history and religion to help listeners and readers better understand current events in the wider Middle East.

In 2020 he published a book, ‘Soldier in the Sand, a Personal History of the Modern Middle East’, which used a three-generational biography of his family to tell the story of the Middle East since the end of World War One. In 2024 he published ‘The House of War, the Struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate’, which examined the 1,300-year confrontation between the Christian and Islamic world through ten great sieges and battles, stretching from the Crusades, and earlier, to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.