Michael Richard Daniell Foot (born 1919), usually known as M.R.D. Foot, is a British historian. The son of a career soldier, he was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, and joined the British Army on the outbreak of World War II, serving with the Royal Artillery. He fought in France during the later stages of the war, also serving as a military intelligence officer, and for a time was a prisoner of war. He was decorated for his service with the French Resistance in Brittany in 1944. After the war Foot taught at Oxford University for eight years before becoming Professor of Modern History at Manchester University. His experiences during the war gave him a life-long interest in the European resistance movements, intelligence matters and the experiences of prisoners of war. He is known for his works of modern military and covert operations history. Foot left the Labour Party while his namesake Michael Foot (to whom he is not related) was leading it, and joined the SDP (Social Democratic Party).
Works
- Great Britain and Luxemburg 1867 (English Historical Review, July 1952)
- Gladstone and Liberalism (1952) with J. L. Hammond
- British Foreign Policy since 1898 (1956)
- Men in Uniform: Military Manpower in Modern Industrial Societies (1961)
- SOE in France. An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France 1940-1944 (1966)
- The Gladstone Dairies (from 1968) editor
- War and Society: Historical Essays in Honour and Memory of J. R. Western 1926-1971 (1973) editor
- Thank God We Kept the Flag Flying: Siege and Relief of Ladysmith 1899-1900 (1974)
- Resistance - An Analysis of European Resistance to Nazism 1940-1945 (1977)
- Six Faces of Courage (1978)
- MI9: Escape or Evasion (1979) with James Maydon Langley
- Little Resistance: Teenage English Girl's Adventures in Occupied France (1982) with Antonia Hunt
- SOE, The Special Operations Executive 1940-1946 (1984)
- Art and War: Twentieth Century Warfare as Depicted By War Artists (1990)
- Open and Secret War, 1938-1945 (1991)
- Oxford Companion to World War II (1995) with I. C. B. Dear
- Foreign Fields: The Story of an SOE Operative (1997)
- Dr. Strangelove I Presume (1999)
- SOE in the Low Countries (2001)
- Secret Lives: Lifting the Lid on Worlds of Secret Intelligence (2002) editor
- The Next Moon: The Remarkable True Story of a British Agent Behind the Lines in Wartime France (2004) with Ewen Southby-Tailyour and Andre Hue
- Clandestine Sea Operations in the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Adriatic 1940-1944: 1940-1944 with Richard Brooks
