JFK: Reckless Youth (1992)

After ten years as official biographer of Field Marshal Montgomery, Nigel Hamilton relished the opportunity to travel to America, become the John F. Kennedy Scholar at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and Visiting Fellow of the John W. McCormack Institute, in order to revisit the life of America's 35th President, John F. Kennedy. Many of the 'standard' works written in the aftermath of the assassination had become stale and out-of-date, if not risible in their adulation - indeed most of them pictured a sort of latter-day saint. Little was known or published concerning the true story of JFK's difficult childhoood, his battle against a fatal but undiagnosed disease (Addison's), and his struggle to asssert his individuality and worth in a family dominated by the ogre, Joseph P. Kennedy --a WWI draft-dodger, Prohibition bootlegger, disastrous would-be movie-maker, outrageously dishonest stock and share manipulator, treacherous ambassador, wild fornicator and yet passionate father. By conducting hundreds of new interviews with JFK's schoolmates, college contemporaries, PT boat colleagues and political associates, as well as by prodigious research in school, college, Kennedy Library, FBI and other archives, Nigel Hamilton was able to reconstruct JFK's life as it had never been pictured before: the winsome, reckless youth of America's best-loved President. The book was denounced by older members of the Kennedy family in loyalty to their long-suffering mother Rose Kennedy, who was still alive (although no longer compos mentis), but was otherwise welcomed as the definitive life of JFK's early years. It was translated into many foreign languages, and dramatised by Bill Broyles for television.

Reviews of JFK: Reckless Youth

Monty: The Making of a General, 1887-1942 (1981)

In 1977, the year after Field-Marshal Montgomery's death, Nigel Hamilton was asked to become his official biographer, and he began work on what was intended to be a brief 'human portrait', which would be later expanded into a more detailed military reexamination of the Field-Marshal's career. The abundance of unpublished new material - letters, diaries and private papers - dictated otherwise; moreover, with Monty's reputation under siege by a cohort of British and American historians it seemed wiser to reconstruct his life from the beginning. Monty: The Making of a General took Monty's life from his birth in Kennington, South London and upbringing in Tasmania (where his father was the first Anglican bishop) to his triumph against Rommel in the battle of Alamein in 1942: the battle which turned the tide of WWII. As Churchill said, 'it might almost be said, before Alamein we never had a victory; after Alamein we never had a defeat.' Monty: The Making of a General won the prestigious Whitbread Prize for Biography, 1981.

Master of the Battlefield : Monty's War Years, 1942-1944. (1983)

How did victory over Rommel on the field of battle affect Monty? In his sequel to Monty: The Making of a General, Nigel Hamilton used Monty's personal diaries, letters, military papers and extensive interviews to chart Monty's struggle with his colleagues - and himself. As his victories grew, so did his ego - and he became often insufferably vain, arrogant and insubordinate once he came under command of General Eisenhower at the end of the campaign in North Africa, in Sicily, Italy, and in the Normandy landings. Monty: Master of the Battlefield tells an uncomfortable story of personal failure to compromise, or 'get along' with his colleagues. But, as the book shows, his foremost loyalty was to his men - and no British commander since Horatio Nelson was able to inspire such loyalty and courage among ordinary men, who respected him as a general who lived at the front, not in rear headquarters, and never put them into battle unless he was certain of victory. The story of how, in January 1944, he took over the D Day landings as Commander in Chief of the American, British and Canadian armies is an especially important (and often overlooked) contribution to modern history. The book ends with the climax of the Battle of Normandy, with the Allied breakout to the Seine, the fall of Paris, and what seemed like the imminent conquest of Nazi Germany.

Monty : Final Years of the Field-Marshal, 1944-1976. (1986)

With the triumph of the Allies in France in August 1940, and the volcanic introduction of Patton's Third US Army and Simpson's 9th US Army into the campaign, it was inevitable that an American commander-in-chief be appointed to lead the Allied ground forces. Monty knew this - yet could not accept the change of leadership in reality. He did not see how General Eisenhower could combine his duties as Supreme Commander of air, naval and land forces, as well as command six Allied armies in the field. Yet in a coalition war in which America was providing the dominant forces, there was no alternative. How the chance to win the war in NW Europe in 1944 was lost; how the battle of Arnhem proved a disaster, and how the Germans brought panic to Allied headquarters in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge form the backdrop to Nigel Hamilton's account of the final nine months of the war in Europe - with the failure of the Allies to seize Berlin from the west as a particularly galling event for Montgomery. The book chronicles Monty's post-war attempts to create a new Model Army in Britain, his inability to get on with Air Marshal Tedder, his difficulty in creating a credible western defence union in Europe with the French, and his appeal to General Eisenhower to rescue him - and western Europe - in setting up NATO. Monty's retirement, his controversial memoirs in 1958 (which effectively destroyed his friendship with Eisenhower), and his increasingly lonely last years are recorded with honesty and compassion.

Monty : The Battles of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery. (1994)

The sixtieth anniversary of the D Day landings saw veterans of all the combattant countries assembling in Normandy and holding remembrance ceremonies across the world. Nigel Hamilton's father had landed as a twenty-six year-old infantry battalion colonel on D+1; by August 1944 his battalion had sustained so many casualties the battalion had to be broken up and the survivors posted to other units. In Monty: The Battles of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery Nigel Hamilton revised and compressed the battle accounts of his three-volume official biography for the general reader, in this tribute to Monty - and the soldiers who risked and often lost their lives in defeating Naziism.

The Brothers Mann : The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann 1871-1950 and 1875-1955. (1968)

Nigel Hamilton broke new ground in biography by looking at the lives not of one writer, but of two, in terms of sibling rivalry. Heinrich Mann is largely forgotten outside Germany, and where remembered, it is as the author of the original novel which served as the basis of the celebrated film The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich. Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and is considered one of the titans of twentieth century literature. How they grew up, interacted, fell out with each other over Germany's prosecution of WWI, were reconciled on what appeared to be Heinrich Mann's deathbed, to become the two most prominent non-Jewish author-opponents of Hitler's Third Reich (both became exiles in 1933) is one of the great sagas of twentieth century literary history. The Brothers Mann was later used as the basis for an examination of sibling creativity among other families in Blood Brothers, edited by Prof Norman Kiell.

Royal Greenwich: a guide and history to London's most historic borough, (1969)

Greenwich - home of the prime meridian, and birthplace of Queen Elizabeth I, encapsulates over a thousand years of British history. Written with Olive Hamilton, Royal Greenwich was designed - literally - to reverse the usual way in which historical guides and topographical histories are presented. The book begins with a lavishly photographed guide (pictures by Stanley Devon) to Greenwich, with sections on the National Maritime Museum, the old Royal Observatory, the Queen's House, the Cutty Sark, Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Naval College, Hawksmoor's St Alfege's Church, Vanbrugh's Castle, the old Royal Palace at Eltham, St Nicholas' Church, Deptford, and many other historic buidings and sites. The guide is followed by an equally lavishly illustrated history of Greenwich from Roman times - the principle being that most of us, as tourists, grow more curious about the history of a place after we have visited it. The book won a Design Award, and was hailed by the Scotsman as 'a landmark in topographical literature'. The cover drawings - of Greenwich seen from across the river Thames, and from the Wolfe statue on Observatory Hill - were specially commissioned from the artist John Bratby, RA.