NIGEL JONES
Nigel Jones combines the careers of historian, journalist, broadcaster and biographer. Born near London, he studied and worked in Germany before beginning his journalism on local newspapers in Hertfordshire and the Cambridge Evening News. He subsequently worked as an editor for the Press Association national news agency, BBC and Independent Radio, satellite TV - and spent four years in the 1990s in Vienna, working for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF. He returned to Britain as deputy editor of History Today and BBC History magazines, and is now a fulltime writer. His current chief project is Tower - An Epic History of the Tower of London, to be published by Hutchinson/Random House in London and St Martin's Press in New York.
He has written for most national newspapers; he conducted the author interviews for the Daily Mail Book Club and currently advises the Mail on books for serialisation. His book reviews appear regularly in The Sunday Telegraph, the Literary Review and History Today.
Nigel Jones has initiated and presented TV and Radio documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four on Wilfred Owen; Patrick Hamilton; the roots of Nazism and the infamous SS Lebensborn children's homes.
An experienced and accomplished public speaker, his appearances include the Cheltenham Literary Festival, the Imperial War Museum; the Almeida Theatre and numerous Waterstones book promotion events and debates. He has written historical essays for counter-factual books on the imagined Premierships of Lords Curzon and Halifax; has edited the posthumous papers and poems of the First World War poet Arthur Graeme West; and written introductions to new editions of Patrick Hamilton's novel Craven House (Black Spring Press 2008 ); and the WW2 spy drama The Venlo Incident (Frontline, 2009). He was a contributing historian to 1001 Days That Shaped The World (Cassell, 2008).
A fluent German speaker, he has guided adult and school tours to the battlefields of the Western Front; English battlefields, and the Nazi death camps in Poland.
Nigel lives in Lewes, East Sussex, with his partner Lally and their three children.
LATEST BOOK: TOWER: AN EPIC HISTORY OF THE TOWER OF LONDON
Castle, royal palace, prison, torture chamber, execution site, zoo, mint, treasure house, armoury, record office, observatory and the most visited tourist attraction in the country, the Tower of London has been all these things and more. No building in Britain has been more intimately involved in our island's story than this mighty, brooding stronghold in the very heart of the capital, a place which has stood at the epicentre of dramatic, bloody and frequently cruel events for almost a thousand years.
Now historian Nigel Jones sets this dramatic story firmly in the context of national - and international - events. In a monumental history drawn from primary sources he pictures the Tower in its many changing moods and a bewildering array of functions. Here, for the first time, is a thematic portrayal of the Tower of London as more than an ancient structure.
The fortress is a living symbol of the nation itself in all its kaleidoscopic colour and rich diversity. Incorporating a dazzling panoply of political and social detail, Tower puts one of Britain's most important buildings firmly at the heart of our national story.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Tower – An Epic History of the Tower of London, Hutchinson / Random House, 2011; St Martin’s Press, (US), Countdown to Valkyrie; The Plot to Assassinate Hitler Frontline, 2009, Mosley, Haus, 2004, Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth, Richard Cohen Books / Metro 1999, Through a Glass darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton, Scribners / Abacus 1991; re-issued by Black Spring Press, 2008), Hitler’s Heralds: The Story of the Freikorps 1918-1923, John Murray, 1987; re-issued by Constable/Robinson as A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis, 2004), The War Walk: A Journey Along the Western Front, 1984: repeatedly re-issued, most recently by Orion, 2008.
