Historian Bo Lidegaard is Politiken’s new editor-in-chief

The Danish broadsheet Politiken, arguably the most interesting newspaper in Scandinavia, today announced that it has hired the historian Bo Lidegaard to the high profile role as its new editor-in-chief in succession to Tøger Seidenfaden, who died in January.
Lidegaard is a somewhat surprising choice, but also an interesting one. At the age of 53 he has little journalistic experience, but is like his predecessors Seidenfaden and Herbert Pundik a well-read intellectual.
An award-winning historian, Lidegaard has in recent years been employed by the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office. Until now he has been leader of the latter’s Climate Secretariat and has by critics been accorded some of the blame for the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit (COP15) in December 2009.
Among his books are a history of Denmark’s foreign policy in the years 1914-45, a highly recommendable volume on Denmark and World War II, a two-volume biography of former Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag, a doctoral dissertation on the life of Henrik Kaufmann (Denmark’s wartime minister in the USA), a pictorial biography of former Prime Minister H. C. Hansen and, most recently, an English overview of modern Danish history, A Short History of Denmark in the 20th Century.