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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Nigel Hamilton

Victory

Time

Stupid

" 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. "

" 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. "

Nigel Hamilton

Iran

President

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

" 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. "

" We should honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt today as the greatest commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in our history, bar none - including President Lincoln. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Republican isolationists had certainly tied the hands of every U.S. president, year after year - berating Franklin Roosevelt in particular and his attempts to ready the nation for inevitable attack. "

" I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh. "

Nigel Hamilton

Than

Understood

" Thanksgiving is a time of togetherness and gratitude. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Regularly, customers asked for a book on Greenwich, and there was none. After all, Elizabeth I was born there. The Observatory is known all over the world; the Royal Naval College is there. So I decided to do it. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Selective memory is surely one of nature's most effective ways of ensuring the survival of our species. "