Neville Maxwell (1926–2019) was an English-born Australian journalist and scholar who covered South Asia for The Times of London during 1959–1967, and one of the few who have seen the Henderson-Brooks Report, which was India's internal report of the 1962 border war with China, which is still currently being classified by the Indian government, and publicly unavailable to Indians. After five decades of the Indian government failing to declassify the Henderson-Brooks report, Maxwell later uploaded part of the report online and authored the book India's China War. The book is considered a revisionist analysis of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, putting the blame for it on India. His views received praise in People's Republic of China and in the Richard Nixon administration.

Maxwell was an Australian born in London. He studied at McGill University, Canada, and the Cambridge University. After graduation, he joined The Times of London, and got posted to its Washington bureau.

In 1959 he was posted to New Delhi as the South Asia correspondent, shortly after the Longju incident, the first Sino-Indian border clash. During the next few years, he reported on the emerging Sino-Indian border conflict, then the end of the Nehru era and the post-Nehru developments in India. During the 1962 Sino-Indian War, Maxwell wrote for The Times from New Delhi and was the only reporter there who did not uncritically accept the official Indian account of events.

In 1967, Maxwell joined the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, as a senior fellow to write his book India's China War. He was with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Oxford University when the book was published in 1970. He remained at Oxford for at least ten years, and created a visiting fellowship programme for journalists from developing countries.

Regarded as a comprehensive revisionist study, India's China War contradicted the then prevalent understanding of the war as a product of Chinese "betrayal and expansionism", and set out to prove that it was "in fact of India’s making, that it was 'India's China War'". The book drew extensively from India's classified Henderson Brooks–Bhagat Report, an internal operational review of India's military debacle, which Maxwell was able to obtain a copy of. Due to the lack of available information from China, Maxwell had to rely on inferences based on official Chinese statements with regards to China's perceptions. He did not attempt to evaluate the accuracy of these perceptions.

India's China War was widely praised across a diverse range of opinions, including British historian A. J. P. Taylor, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. On the other hand, Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew considered it "revisionist, pro-China history". In India, the Indian government charged him with breach of the Official Secrets Act, forcing him to stay out of India to avoid arrest until the charges were annulled by Prime Minister Morarji Desai eight years later.

The book was apparently instrumental in bridging the gulf between the US and China. Henry Kissinger had read the book, and recommended it to Richard Nixon. He told Zhou Enlai, "Reading that book showed me I could do business with you people." Nixon too is said to have discussed the book with Zhou Enlai during his 1972 visit to China. Chinese leaders heaped praise on the book. In a banquet in 1971, Zhou En-lai and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto walked up to Maxwell and raised a toast. Zhou said, "your book did a service to truth which benefitted China."

Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar, who was a reporter for The Times during the same time that Maxwell was its correspondent in Delhi, says that Maxwell had deep an anti-Indian bias, labelling it an "understatement". He likened him to a British colonial. At the same time, Maxwell was said to have had full praise for China's authoritarian regime. Others that knew him echo similar sentiments.