Philip Sandeman Ziegler (24 December 1929 – 22 February 2023) was a British biographer and historian.
Background
Ziegler was born in Ringwood, Hampshire on 24 December 1929, the son of Louis Ziegler, an Army officer, and Dora Barnwell, a homemaker.
He was educated at St Cyprian's School,
Eastbourne, and went with the school when it merged with Summer Fields School,
Oxford. He attended
Eton College and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1951 with a first class degree in
Jurisprudence from Oxford before joining the British Foreign Service.
In the Foreign Service, he served in
Vientiane, where he worked with the US ambassador to Laos Charles W. Yost, and also to
Pretoria, and Bogotá, as well as with the Delegation to
NATO in Paris.
[Biographical Note to The Black Death Penguin Books, 1982 reprint]
Writing career
In 1967, he resigned from the Foreign Service and joined the publishers
HarperCollins, which was, at the time, run by his father-in-law.
Originally intending to be a novelist, he began a career as biographer with his life of
Talleyrand's lover, the Duchess of Dino. He was editor in chief at Collins from 1979 to 1980.
He was chosen as official biographer of
Edward VIII, for which he was later appointed CVO. Ziegler wrote for various journals and newspapers, including
The Spectator,
The Listener,
The Times,
The Daily Telegraph and
History Today.
[
]
Personal life and death
In 1967, gunmen broke into Ziegler's family home in Bogotá and shot dead his wife, Sarah Collins. Ziegler was wounded in the attack.
Ziegler died from cancer on 22 February 2023, at the age of 93.
Works
-
Duchess of Dino (1962) on Princess Dorothea of Courland
-
(1965)
-
The Black Death (1969)
-
King William IV (1971)
-
Omdurman (1973)
-
Melbourne: a Biography of William Lamb 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1976) on Lord Melbourne the Prime Minister
-
Crown and People (1978)
-
Diana Cooper (1981)
-
Mountbatten. The Official Biography (1985)
-
Elizabeth's Britain 1926 to 1986 (1986)
-
Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920–1922: Tours with the Prince of Wales (1987) editor
-
Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, South-East Asia, 1943–1946 (1988)
-
The Sixth Great Power: Barings Bank 1762–1929 (1988)
-
From Shore to Shore – The Final Years: The Diaries of Earl Mountbatten of Burma 1953–1979 (1989)
-
Edward VIII, the Official Biography (1990)
-
Brooks's: A Social History (1991) editor with Desmond Seward
-
Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (1993) on Harold Wilson
-
London at War 1939–1945 (1995)
-
Osbert Sitwell (1998)
-
Britain Then and Now: The Francis Frith Collection (1999)
-
Soldiers: Fighting Men's Lives, 1901–2001 (2001)
-
Rupert Hart-Davis: Man of Letters (2004)
-
Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, The Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships (2008)
-
Edward Heath (2010)
-
Olivier (2013)
-
George VI (Penguin Monarchs): The Dutiful King (2015)
-
Between the Wars: 1919–1939 (2016)
See also
