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 for Thomas Hobbes, of which the Correspondence has been published.
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.
"The New Bully of the Balkans", the article Malcolm published about Greece in The Spectator in 1992 caused then editor Boris Johnson to call contributor Taki in apology, as the article was critical of the Greek pseudo-nationalist position. Yet apart from the Macedonian question, Greece has eventually played a more constructive role in the region than he predicted.
"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)
Reviews of books on Yugoslavia by Noel Malcolm
"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.
"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.
"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.