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All Quotes by author - Nigel Hamilton

" After university, I taught secondary school for a while and opened a bookshop in Greenwich, just east of London. "

" As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair. "

" At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right. "

" Bad reviews are the bane of an author's post-publication existence. "

" 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. "

" Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia. "

" 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. "

" Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am all for charity in judging the men who have occupied the Oval Office over the past seventy years, given the huge responsibilities the president carries across the world. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm not promising to write 'JFK 2' - but one day, I might! "

" 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 my case, I belong to a group of aspiring and practicing biographers in Boston. We meet once a month for a coupla hours. It's become my lifeline - forgive the pun. "

" 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 once wrote that Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, had doctored his diaries as well as his famous patient. That was true but unfair. Although their authenticity as contemporary, daily accounts is often questionable, the observations are quite wonderful. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse! "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Our only president who has died as U.S. commander in chief in war is Franklin Delano Roosevelt - who died of a cerebral hemorrhage or massive stroke on April 12, 1945, only three weeks before the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces he had laid down as implacable Allied policy two years before. "

" President Ford was taken for a ride by his predecessor, whom he unpardonably pardoned; Jimmy Carter was also taken for a ride, but by his successor, Ronald Reagan, over the return of the Iran hostages. "

" President Gerald Ford was no intellectual, but he had served with distinction in combat as a naval gunnery officer and then as Congressman for a quarter century. "

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