Nigel Hamilton

An in-depth analysis of FDR's leadership during the Second World War reveals how he assumed control over key decisions to launch a successful trial landing in North Africa to shift the war in favor of Allied forces. 50,000 first printing.

FDR at War, 1941-1942

The Mantle of Command

In the sequel to the National Book Award longlistedMantle of Command, Nigel Hamilton continues"the memoir that Roosevelt didn't get to write"(New York Times Book Review)with the story of FDR's battles with Churchill throughout 1943."

FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

Commander in Chief

JFK Reckless Youth

Modeled on one of the most famous histories of ancient Rome, "The Twelve Caesars," Hamilton looks afresh at the lives and careers of the 12 leaders of the American empire since World War II, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush

American Caesars

"To mark the 75th anniversary of D-day, here is the final triumph--and tragedy--of FDR as U.S. wartime commander in chief, the Allies' key strategist, and prophet of the postwar world. Nigel Hamilton's view of FDR's leadership has revolutionized our understanding of Roosevelt, Churchill, and their competing strategies in World War II. In planning the African and Italian campaigns, FDR had to overcome Churchill's obsession with the Mediterranean and defeat the British prime minister's resistance to mounting D-day. In [this book], his tour de force covering the climactic events of 1944 and '45, Hamilton reveals FDR's genius at Allied leadership: the man most responsible for D-day, and the visionary who planned for a lasting peace he would not live to witness. In Hamilton's trademark detail, we see FDR design, defend, and ultimately insist on the great American-led invasion of France in June 1944, and why--and how--he appointed Eisenhower to command it. As FDR's D-day triumph turns to personal tragedy, however, we watch with heartbreaking compassion as coronary disease threatens his life. Yet how bravely thereafter the dying president attempts, at Hawaii, Quebec, and Yalta, to prepare the United Nations for an American-backed postwar world order. Using hitherto unpublished documents and interviews, Hamilton rewrites the self-serving account of the war strategy given by Winston Churchill in his famous memoirs. Now at last we see FDR in his true role as the Allied mastermind of the war and the architect of postwar peace."--Dust jacket.

FDR's Final Odyssey, D-Day to Yalta, 1943-1945

War and Peace

Brothers Mann

From Nigel Hamilton's acclaimed World War II saga, the astonishing story of FDR's yearlong, defining battle with Churchill in 1943, as the war raged in Africa and Italy. 1943 was the year of Allied military counteroffensives, beating back the forces of the Axis powers in North Africa and the Pacific—the “Hinge of Fate,” as Winston Churchill called it. In Commander in Chief, Nigel Hamilton reveals FDR’s true role in this saga: overruling his own Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordering American airmen on an ambush of the Japanese navy’s Admiral Yamamoto, facing down Churchill when he attempted to abandon Allied D-day strategy (twice). This FDR is profoundly different from the one Churchill later painted. President Roosevelt’s patience was tested to the limit quelling the prime minister’s “revolt,” as Churchill pressured Congress and senior American leaders to focus Allied energy on disastrous fighting in Italy and the Aegean instead of landings in Normandy. Finally, in a dramatic showdown at Hyde Park, FDR had to stop Churchill from losing the war by making the ultimate threat, setting the Allies on their course to final victory. In Commander in Chief, Hamilton masterfully chronicles the clash of nations—and of two titanic personalities—at a crucial moment in modern history.

Commander In Chief

Hans Renders

In this book - an ABC of the genre, with 26 entries - two renowned biographers and teachers take us on a tour, from A for Authorization to Z for Zigzagging to the End. In trenchant, witty entries they explore the good, the bad and the plain ugly in modern 'life writing' and the portrayal of real lives today - and how, across history and continents, we got here. This book will fascinate general readers interested in how real lives are approached by biographers today in a multitude of media. It will make a much-needed contribution in academia, as well as providing an important text for students of history, language and literature, the arts, science and media. And, not least, for biographers trying to avoid the pitfalls of ignorance or ineptitude.

The ABC of Modern Biography

A Guide and History to London's Most Historic Borough

Royal Greenwich

Details the last thirty-two years of Monty's life, from the Normandy invasion and the end of World War II to his death

Final Years, of the Field-Marshal, 1944-1976

Monty

Nigel Hamilton brings all the magisterial authority he brought to his Whitbread-winning biography of Monty, and all the talent for tracking down and verifying hidden, controversial material that he showed in JFK: Reckless Youth, which topped the American bestseller charts for months, in this new biography of Bill Clinton. Born into a 'white trash' family in backwoods, racially segregated Arkansas, he suffered under an alcoholic, violent stepfather, on one occasion having to fight him physically in order to protect his mother. As a youth he would become inspired by the civil rights movement, particularly Martin Luther King, and as a student became a long-haired hippy musician, involved in radical politics and also discovering free love. Hamilton tells the story of how Clinton's sexual and political career developed hand in hand. This is a book about sexual politics on many levels, showing how Clinton's life was formed by changing attitudes. Here is a man who, far from being a sexual predator or exploiter of his position - like JFK - was swept to power because women adored him, whether Democratic party helpers, the women of the American electorate - or indeed Hilary Clinton, whose powerfully manipulative personality is shown to have been vital to his success,. Clinton has been polygamous throughout his adult life, and Hamilton's fascinating portrait of a marriage examines Hilary's relationship with his quite astonishing number of girlfriends. The book also covers his time at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, his political apprenticeship and his rise to power, culminating in his election as President in '92.

An American Journey

Bill Clinton

This fascinating study of military leadership follows British general Bernard Law Montgomery's military career from his cadet days and service in World War I to his great victories of World War II, including his defeat of the great German panzer commander, Erwin Rommel, at Alamein. Nigel Hamilton presents a brilliant, arrogant Montgomery, who refused to bow to authority and skated on the edge of dismissal like his American counterpart, George S. Patton. Though very different in their command styles, Montgomery and Patton became the two most successful Allied field generals in World War II. From North Africa through the invasion of Sicily, they routed the Germans in battle, with Patton as a thrusting cavalryman and Montgomery as an infantry commander devoted to applying massive force at a vital point. The author contends that Montgomery's planning and leadership transformed Operation Overlord from a Second Front project doomed to fail into a successful Allied invasion plan. Allied operations after Normandy foundered in bitter arguments and failure, for Montgomery at Arnhem and Patton at Metz. Had Montgomery and Patton been ordered to fight in the same direction after Normandy, argues Professor Hamilton, the Allies might have ended the war in Europe in 1944. As it was, Montgomery and Patton had to save the Allies from sensational defeat in the Battle of the Bulge in what was to be their last battle together. The war ended for Monty on May 4, 1945, when he accepted the surrender of all German forces in the north.

D-Day Commander

Montgomery

Encompasses the early years of Kennedy's career, his youth and Harvard education, the story of PT-109, his affair with a suspected Nazi spy, and more

JFK, Reckless Youth

An insightful portrait of U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Hamilton examines their unique characters, their paths to Pennsylvania Avenue, their effectiveness as global leaders, and their lessons in governance, both good and bad.

Bill Clinton, forty-second president of the United States, is the quintessential baby boomer: on the one hand blessed with a near-genius IQ, on the other, beset by character flaws that made his presidency a veritable soap opera of high ideals, distressing incompetence, model financial stewardship, and domestic misbehavior. In an era of cultural civil war, the Clinton administration fed the public an almost daily diet of scandal and misfortune. Who is Bill Clinton, though, and how did this baby-boom saga begin? Clinton’s upbringing in Arkansas and his student years at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale universities help us to see his life not only as a personal story but as the story of modern America. Behind the closed doors of the house on the hill above Park Avenue in Hot Springs, the struggle between Clinton’s stepfather and mother became ultimately unbearable, causing Virginia to move out and divorce Roger Clinton. Dreading confrontation, Bill Clinton excelled in almost every field save athletics. But the fabled success of the scholarship boy would be marred by the decisions he came to make regarding Vietnam and military service—choices that haunt him to this day. We watch with a mixture of alarm, fascination, and awe as Bill Clinton does so much that is right—and so much that is wrong. He sets his cap for the star student at Yale, young Hillary Rodham, seducing her with his dreams of a better America and an aw-shucks grin. Wherever he goes, he charms and disarms—young and old, men and women...and more women. He becomes a law professor straight out of college; he contests a congressional election in his twenties—and almost wins it. He becomes attorney general of his state and within two years is set to become the youngest-ever governor of Arkansas, at only thirty-two. Yet, always, there is a curse, a drive toward personal self-destruction—and with that the destruction of all those who are helping him on his legendary path. His affair with Gennifer Flowers strains his marriage and later nearly scuttles his bid for the presidency. He is thrown out of the governor’s office after only one term and suffers a life-shaking crisis of confidence. Though with the stalwart help of a female chief of staff he regains his crown, it is clear that Bill Clinton’s charismatic career is a ceaseless tightrope walk above the forces that threaten to pull him down—the most potent of them residing in his own being. Imbued with sympathy, deep intelligence, and the storyteller’s art, this extraordinary biography helps us, at last, to understand the real Bill Clinton as he stumbles and withdraws from the 1988 presidential nomination race but enters it four years later, to make one of the most astonishing bids for the presidency in the twentieth century: the climax of this gripping political, social, and scandalous journey.

Great Expectations

Bill Clinton: An American Journey

For thousands of years we have recorded real lives--the lives of others, and of ourselves. For what purpose and for whom has this universal and timeless pursuit endured? What obstacles have lain in the path of biographers in the past, and what continues to confound biographers today? Above all, how is it that biographies and autobiographies play such a contested, popular role in contemporary Western culture, from biopics to blogs, from memoir to docudrama? Award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton addresses these questions in an incisive and vivid narrative that will appeal to students of human nature and self-representation across the arts and sciences. Tracing the remarkable and often ignored historical evolution of biography from the ancient world to the present, this brief and fascinating tour of the genre conveys the passionate quest to capture the lives of individuals and the many difficulties it has entailed through the centuries. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to American Splendor, from cuneiform to the Internet, from commemoration to deconstruction, from fiction to fact--by way of famous biographical artists such as Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Sigmund Freud, Lytton Strachey, Abel Gance, Virginia Woolf, Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, Julian Barnes, Ted Hughes, Frank McCourt, and many others--Nigel Hamilton's Biography: A Brief History will change the way you think about biography and real lives.

A Brief History

Biography

Studies the political and artistic rivalry and emotional closeness of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, analyzing the cultural, social, and familial milieu in which the brothers developed and worked

The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871-1950 and 1875-1955

The Brothers Mann

The astonishing story of FDR's year-long battle with Churchill as World War II raged in Africa and Italy. In his masterly Mantle of Command, Nigel Hamilton made a powerful case for Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the brilliant war strategist whose towering importance to the Second World War is overlooked because of his early death. Now, in this second installment of his major trilogy, Hamilton reveals the remarkable truth - suppressed by Winston Churchill in his memoirs - of how Roosevelt battled with Churchill to maintain the strategy that would win the war. Roosevelt knew the Allies should take Sicily but avoid a wider battle in the Mediterranean, building experience but saving strength to invade France in early 1944. Churchill seemed to agree at Casablanca - only to undermine his own generals and the Allied command, testing Roosevelt's patience to the limit. Seeking to avoid the D-Day landings, Churchill made the disastrous decision to push the battle further into southern Europe, almost losing the war for the Allies. In a dramatic showdown, FDR finally set the course for victory by making the ultimate threat. Challenging seven decades of conventional wisdom about not one but two world leaders, Commander in Chief draws on extraordinary new archive material to delve further into the minds and actions of the men who led the Allied powers in the crucial year that decided the outcome of World War II.

Would-be biographers will learn the excitement and perils of modern research, the secrets of good and great biography, and the essential components of life narrative, in an informative manual written by an award-winning biographer.

A Primer

How To Do Biography

The bestselling first volume of this biography of John F. Kennedy by Nigel Hamilton, author of the Whitbread Award-winning biography of Field Marshal Montgomery, has caused unprecedented controversy by its frankness and its overturning of myths. But whether or not family and the political establishment like it, it is the nearest we will ever get to the JFK story from JFK's own point of view. RECKLESS YOUTH is based on a wealth of hitherto unpublished material from JFK's closest surviving friends, from FBI, Navy college and National Archives records, as well as much new material in JFK's own words. 'Nigel Hamilton's story, told with great intelligence and sympathy, is of how Jack came to terms with his inheritance and frightful upbringing . . . He has done a splendid job . . . enthralling reading, ' DAILY TELEGRAPH

Nigel Hamilton

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