Nigel Hamilton
Nigel Hamilton
Nigel Hamiltonis an award-winning British-born biographer, academic and broadcaster, whose works have been translated into sixteen languages. In the United States he is known primarily for his best-selling work on the young John F. Kennedy, JFK: Reckless Youth, which was made into an ABC miniseries. In the United Kingdom, he is known for Monty, a three-volume official life of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, the World War II Field Marshal which won both the 1981 Whitbread Award and the Templer Medal...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 February 1944
My father had left school at 18, without enough money to go to college - and, with four sons after the war, said he could still not afford to do so.
It must have been the fall of 1952 when my father returned to London sporting a neck tie emblazoned with the words 'I Like Ike.'
I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh.
I'm not promising to write 'JFK 2' - but one day, I might!
I grew up and lived in a Britain in which strikes and the threat of strikes had become part of the social fabric - and it was not very nice.
For all the failures of naval, air and army defense, the men who died at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines would not die in vain.
Bad reviews are the bane of an author's post-publication existence.
After university, I taught secondary school for a while and opened a bookshop in Greenwich, just east of London.
I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.
Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy.
Thanksgiving is a time of togetherness and gratitude.
Both JFK and George W. Bush were the sons of wealthy U.S. ambassadors and thus privileged to meet distinguished figures, to travel, and to see the world and think about its problems if they chose.
Bill Clinton beat Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, for the White House in 1992 by focusing on 'the economy, stupid' - and Clinton's victory led, in time, to the longest sustained boom in American history.
What George W. Bush learned in his pre-presidential years - and what he omits in his new memoirs - was not how to lead a nation, but how, with sufficient toughness, to cheat the democratic system to get elected.