Barbara Leaming – författare

New York Times bestselling biographer Barbara Leaming has written a riveting political dramaof the last ten years of Winston Churchill''s public life.

In Churchill Defiant, Leaming tells the tumultuous behind-the-scenes story of Churchill''s refusal to retire after his 1945 electoral defeat, and the bare-knuckled political and personal battles that ensued. Her ground-breaking biography Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman, was the first to detail Churchill''s extraordinary influence on Kennedy''s thinking. Now in Churchill Defiant, Leaming gives us a vivid and compelling narrative that sheds fresh light on both the human dimension of Winston Churchill and on the struggles and achievements of his final years. At last, in Leaming''s eloquent account, we understand the tangled web of personal relationships and rivalries, the intricate interplay of past and present, the looming sense of history that makes the story of these years as fascinating as anything in the extraordinary century-long saga of Winston Churchill''s life.

The untold story of how one woman''s life was changed forever in a matter of seconds by a horrific trauma.Barbara Leaming''s extraordinary and deeply sensitive biography is the first book to document Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis'' brutal, lonely and valiant thirty-one year struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that followed JFK''s assassination.Here is the woman as she has never been seen before. In heartrending detail, we witness a struggle that unfolded at times before our own eyes, but which we failed to understand.Leaming''s biography also makes clear the pattern of Jackie''s life as a whole. We see how a spirited young woman''s rejection of a predictable life led her to John F. Kennedy and the White House, how she sought to reconcile the conflicts of her marriage and the role she was to play, and how the trauma of her husband''s murder which left her soaked in his blood and brains led her to seek a very different kind of life from the one she''d previously sought.A life story that has been scrutinized countless times, seen here for the first time as the serious and important story that it is. A story for our times at a moment when we as a nation need more than ever to understand the impact of trauma.

She was the tempestuous, strong-willed woman who ignited the movie screen with her legendary performances in Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, and All About Eve. Off-camera, Bette Davis fought endless contractual battles with studios and survived four disastrous marriages, earning a larger-than-life reputation as an actress to be reckoned with. In this extraordinary biography, fans and film historians will discover a different, darker side of Bette Davis: a woman beset with scarring personal and professional doubts, a daughter whose mother was devoted to her success, and a mother who loved her own daughter to distraction. Obsessive and compulsive, Davis was happy only when she was working, but did not always choose her projects wisely. She fought a lifelong battle with alcohol, and she had an insatiable need to be loved, often at great emotional cost. A legend, a star, a remarkable woman, Bette Davis lived her life as if it were a coveted role she was desperately afraid she might not win.