Since the publication of Dresden Tuesday 13 February 1945 Fred has lectured widely and appeared on expert panels, in venues as various as the Hay-on-Wye Festival (panel with Anthony Beevor and AC Grayling), the Edinburgh Book Festival (2004 and 2006), the Salisbury Festival, the World War II Experience Centre Series of Lectures, the Reform Club (London), and Dresden Town Hall, where in January 2005 he delivered the keynote lecture (in German) at a day seminar organised by the Hannah Arendt Institute. Fred has participated in BBC Radio’s Start the Week and Night Waves and has also contributed to The Today Programme. He appeared as an on-screen commentator for Channel 4 Television’s Bomber Crew and has also been interviewed regularly on National Public Radio in the USA. His second major historical book, The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 - 9 November 1989, was published in 2006 in Britain and in June 2007 in the USA.
Dresden has been translated into ten languages, and The Berlin Wall into fifteen, including most recently Chinese. He is currently working on a project that will cast new and perhaps controversial light on the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Fred has three grown-up children and now lives with his wife, the American poet and writer Alice Kavounas, in Cornwall, United Kingdom. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain. He is represented for books, broadcasting and other professional activity by the Jane Turnbull Agency.