Malcolm was educated at Eton College, read History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, wrote his doctorate dissertation at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was for a time Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

He is a former Foreign Editor of The Spectator, and columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He gave up journalism in 1995 to become a full time writer, becoming in 2002 a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He serves on the advisory board of the conservative magazine Standpoint. He is the general editor for the Clarendon edition of the complete works of Thomas Hobbes, and the editor of The Correspondence.

He now chairs the Board of Trustees at the Bosnian Institute, an organization on Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Noel Malcolm is the author of Bosnia: A Short History (1994), Origins of English Nonsense (1997), Kosovo: A Short History (1998), Aspects of Hobbes (2002), and (with Jacqueline Stedall) John Pell (1611-1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (2005). He is the editor of The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (1994). He has also written George Enescu: His Life and Music (1990) (Toccata Press). He also wrote a pamphlet in 1991 titled Sense on Sovereignty, a discussion of the arguments about Britain's membership of the European Union published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

• "South Ossetia is not Kosovo", Standpoint, 29 September 2008
• "Is Kosovo Serbia? We ask a historian" The Guardian, Tuesday 26 February 2008.
• "Nato must remain until the job is done", The Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2001.
• "Milosevic was doomed by press freedom", The Sunday Telegraph, 1 July 2001.
• "Why we were right to bomb Kosovo", The Daily Telegraph, 24 March 2000.
• "Independence for Kosovo", The New York Times, 9 June 1999.
• "Kosovo, Serbian Nationalism and Territorial Partition", HABSBURG Reviews, 10 May 1999.
• "Response to Amos Perlmutter's op-ed "Who Will Run Kosovo", The Washington Times, 4 May 1999.
• "What Ancient Hatreds?", Foreign Affairs, January/February 1999.
• "Kosovo: Only Independence Will Work", The National Interest, Winter 1998/99.

• "Kicking Kenney on Kosovo", The Nation, 16 November 1998, Volume 267, Number 16.

• "Kosovo's History", New York Review of Books, 16 July 1998.
• "Kosovo and Bosnia: three points", Bosnian report, March-May 1998, New Series no.3.
• "The Past Must Not Be Prologue", Time, 30 March 1998, Vol. 151 N° 13.
• "The grandee and a question of genocide", Daily Mail, 6 November 1996.
• "Appease with Dishonor: Faulty History", Foreign Affairs, November/December 1995.
• "The Vlachs in Bosnia" Extract from Bosnia: a short history, 1994
• "The New Bully of the Balkans", The Spectator, 15 August 1992

In French

• "La fable de l'islamisme bosniaque" ("The hoax of Bosniak islamicism"), pp. 207-210 of Noel Malcolm : "Bosnia, A Short History"
• "Le Kosovo, le nationalisme serbe et la partition territoriale" ("Kosovo, Serbian Nationalism and Territorial Partition")
• "Quelles haines ancestrales ?" ("What ancient hatreds?")
• "Les mouvements de population au Kosovo" ("Population movements in Kosovo")
• "Le Kosovo appartient-il à la Serbie ? Nous posons la question à un historien" ("Is Kosovo Serbia? We ask a historian")

In Albanian

• "Kosova është territor i humbur për Serbinë", Intervistoi Iliriana A. Bajo, Radio Evropa e Lirë, 3. Dhjetor, 2003. ("Kosovo is a lost territory for Serbia", interview by Iliriana A. Bajo, Radio Free Europe, 3 December 2003)

• "Britain's fatal foreign policy", Review of the book by Brendan Simms: Unfinest Hour: 'Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (Allen Lane/Penguin), Bosnian Report, January - May 2002, New Series No 27-28.
• "The dysfunctional functionary", The Sunday Telegraph, 20 October 2000.
• "Stay the Hand of Vengeance", Review of: Stay the Hand of Vengeance: the politics of war crimes tribunals, by Gary Bass, Princeton University Press, The Sunday Telegraph, 15 October 2000.
• "Fighting For Peace: Bosnia 1994", Review of the book by General Sir Michael Rose, Harvill, London, Bosnian Institute, 1998.
• "Norman Cigar's Genocide in Bosnia: the policy of ethnic cleansing", The Sunday Telegraph, 11 June 1995.
• "David Owen and his Balkan bungling", extended version of a review of Lord Owen's "Balkan Odyssey" (London 1995, New York 1996), first published in The Sunday Telegraph on 12 November 1995.

???? ???????Noel MalcolmNoel MalcolmNoel Malcolm