Quotes from Nigel Hamilton

I'm fascinated by the concept of what I call 'clusters of creativity': the Brontes, the Waughs, families with several geniuses. I'm one of four; competition among siblings has to be a factor.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.

My father had risen in the British Army under the revolutionary aegis of General Montgomery, who was mad about training for battle, not muddling into disaster.

I was an 18-year-old kid, and I was in the heart of things in Washington. My interest in American politics and, particularly, the Kennedys, began then.

In daring to re-tell the stories of the last twelve American presidents, both public and private, I knew I would incur some outrage with 'American Caesars.'

In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK - which was highly laudatory - but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms.

I belong to the Boston Biographers Group - and get my monthly 'fix' from them. Where else can I sit down for two hours with people who understand the challenge I face, daily, as a life-chronicler?

Traditionally Presidents Day was Washington's birthday. It was celebrated as a public holiday on February 22 each year, in peace or in war.

Some of the History Channel's documentaries involve docudrama segments and are highly speculative - but there seems, on the part of the producers, to be a real determination to get at the history behind our past - not the sex, which is left to drama shows and entertainment channels.

To be sure, administrations since Ronald Reagan had gone out of their way to massage and 'spin' news to the president's advantage, while the media did its best to un-spin it.

Secretary Hull was even more skeptical of de Gaulle than the President. He was equally opposed to the restoration of France's colonial empire in the postwar world save as trusteeships — for how could American sons be expected to give their lives merely to reestablish a colonial yoke they themselves had thrown off in 1783?

It had been Theodore Roosevelt's dictum — using a supposed West African proverb — that a successful leader should "speak softly and carry a big stick.

The House of Savoy never finished a war on the same side it started, unless the war lasted long enough to change sides twice," a Free French newspaper commented sarcastically.

We must be sure that when you have won victory, you will not have to tell your children that you fought in vain—that you were betrayed. We must be sure that in your homes there will not be want—that in your schools only the living truth will be taught—that in your churches there may be preached without fear a faith in which men may deeply believe.

The President certainly did not take amiss Churchill's excitement over Mediterranean operations, or even the Prime Minister's loyalty to a decaying British empire. Churchill was, he felt, merely misguided — the product of high Victorian imperialism

Picasso (full name Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso)

Deference to the military by political leaders in World War I had permitted the senseless battles of attrition on the Western Front.

The President, King had found on arrival, was "sitting up in his bed" on the second floor of the White House mansion, "wearing a gray sweater," smoking. He'd

Goebbels's April announcement of totaler Krieg, in Roosevelt's view, had merely confirmed his judgment of Germany as the world's most dangerous nation, given the size and ruthlessness of its Wehrmacht and the abiding belief that Macht ist Recht: might is right.

Of his first wife, Ekatarina, who had died of tuberculosis in 1907, a year after their marriage, Stalin had reportedly said: "With her died my last warm feelings for humanity."3)

More troubling still had been the sickening revelation, in April 1943, that more than twenty thousand Polish officers, police officers, and members of the intelligentsia had, on Stalin's orders, been murdered in cold blood by Soviet occupation forces in 1940, during the time of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. That disclosure — the decomposing Polish bodies unearthed by the Germans in the Katyn forest near the Russian city of Smolensk, but the Soviets denying culpability

Communism was a godless ideology: an idealized system of human government that could only be maintained by operating a ruthless police state

If a leader merely carried out what historical forces made inevitable, it is not the person that mattered, it is the moment in time