HENRY Reece, chief executive of Oxford University Press from 1998 to 2009, has won the Samuel Pepys Award for a ground-breaking study on the Army and Oliver Cromwell.

The Army in Cromwellian England was commissioned by Oxford University Press in 1982 while Mr Reece, pictured, was working for publishers, Prentice Hall, 16 years before he joined OUP.

The manuscript was finally delivered in 2012, 30 years later, and published by OUP in January.