Michael Thomas Walter Arnheim (also known as "Doctor Mike"; born 24 March 1944) is a practising London Barrister, Sometime Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and author. He has written twenty-two published books to date, including most recently the philosophical work, The God Book, and political works, Two Models of Government and Anglo-American Law: A Comparison. Previously published books include The Handbook of Human Rights Law, Principles of the Common Law, The U.S. Constitution for Dummies (part of Wiley's For Dummies series), and The Problem with Human Rights Law. Michael Arnheim was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to a secular orthodox Jewish family. His father, Dr Wilhelm Arnheim, who had come to South Africa from Germany in 1933, was a medical doctor and a polymath with a dry sense of humor. His mother, Victoria ("Vicky", née Shames) was a music teacher and an active member of the Council of Johannesburg's Great Synagogue. She was born in South Africa of Lithuanian-born parents, her father, Wolf Shames, being a noted rabbinical scholar. Michael Arnheim was particularly close to his paternal grandmother, Martha Arnheim (née Bernhardt, always called "Oma"), from whom he learnt German and by whom he was entertained with her amusing tales of life in Baerwalde, Pomerania, in pre-World War I Germany. Oma's husband (Michael Arnheim's grandfather), Max Arnheim, a prosperous barrel manufacturer, served in the German army in World War I, and Oma's father, Julius Bernhardt, fought proudly on the Prussian side in the Danish- Prussian War of 1864, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. As a 14-year-old student at King Edward VII School in Johannesburg, Arnheim was picked to join the "Quiz Kids" team of five capped and gowned teenagers, appearing on South Africa's Springbok Radio, and of which he became a stalwart member, "retiring" at the age of eighteen. He entered Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand at the age of 16, he took a first-class B.A. in History and Classics at the age of 19, first-class Honours at 20 and an M.A. with distinction at the age of 21. He then went up to St John's College, Cambridge, on a National Scholarship (later converted to a St John's College scholarship supplemented by a Strathcona Travel Exhibition). Besides his academic pursuits (including teaching numerous undergraduates) he engaged in student politics, being elected a member of the Junior Combination Room committee and College NUS secretary, in which capacity he represented the College at several national conferences, including one in 1968 at which he proposed a widely supported motion to the effect that the English A-Level system was unduly narrow and should be broadened. He captained the College's University Challenge team, which displayed a hedgehog as its mascot by way of a gentle ribbing of the then Master of St John's, John Boys Smith, who had just published a paper on the subject. Arnheim had as his Ph.D. supervisor A.H.M. ("Hugo") Jones, then Cambridge Professor of Ancient History, and John Crook as his college mentor, who was to occupy the position of Professor of Ancient History later on. In 1969, at the age of 25, Arnheim was awarded his Cambridge Ph.D. His doctoral dissertation was subsequently published by the Oxford University Press under the title The Senatorial Aristocracy in the Later Roman Empire. In the meantime Arnheim was elected a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, where he did a great deal of teaching for a number of colleges while researching his next book, Aristocracy in Greek Society (1977), which he was invited by Professor Howard Hayes Scullard to write as part of the prestigious Thames & Hudson series, Aspects of Greek and Roman Life. At the age of 31 Arnheim was invited to take up the position of full Professor and Head of the Department of Classics back at his old university in South Africa. During this time he devised a new system of learning Latin, which he would later integrate into a new approach to the learning of European languages in general. In 1979 he published South Africa after Vorster, which correctly predicted that the alternative to White rule was not some sort of shared-power democracy between Blacks and Whites, as White "liberals" hoped, but rule by a Black oligarchy at the expense of Whites and ordinary Blacks alike. Arnheim's next book. Is Christianity True? (1984), caused quite a stir and was translated into several languages, including Spanish. Through a close re-examination of the historical evidence the book asserted that most Christian beliefs about Jesus were untrue. Despite this, Arnheim was invited to address Professor Henry Chadwick's Patristics seminar in the Cambridge Divinity School. Despondent about the future of South Africa, Arnheim returned to Britain, where he was called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1988, and went into practice as a London barrister specializing in civil litigation, with a certain amount of criminal defence on the side, notably the Cardiff Prison Riot trial in 1992. Arnheim, in 1992, was an early voice in the legal profession to adamantly insist that a person could face criminal liability for knowingly concealing their HIV-positive status from a sexual partner. His civil law practice has been largely in the field of commercial litigation including some international litigation as of counsel to Brown & Welsh P.C. of Meriden, Connecticut. From early on in his practice at the Bar, Arnheim wrote articles in favor of clients' being allowed to come direct to a barrister, thus avoiding the additional expense of having to be referred by a solicitor. His pleas fell on deaf ears until the idea was taken up in a hard-hitting report by the Director of Fair Trading, Sir John Vickers, published in 2000. Arnheim was one of the first barristers to register for direct public access when this was eventually allowed in 2004. Arnheim has also written extensively on other legal topics, ranging from court procedure to the common law, constitutional law, judicial power and human rights.