Synopsis
Celebrated Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, whose new biography of Henry Kissinger was published last year offers some historical lessons for the next American president. An outspoken critic of the foreign policies of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Ferguson is best known for his books The Ascent of Money and Civilization: The West and the Rest.
Biography
Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
He is the author of fourteen books. His first, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001, after a year as a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, he published The Cash Nexus. His other books include Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, Civilization: The West and the Rest, and The Great Degeneration.
An accomplished biographer, Ferguson is also the author of High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg (2010) and is currently writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which — Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist — has just been published to critical acclaim.
He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His many other prizes include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013).
In addition to writing a weekly column for the Sunday Times (London) and the Boston Globe, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a Cambridge-based advisory firm.
