Nicholas Best

For the strongman, see Nick Best.

Nicholas Best is a British author of Anglo-Irish origin. He grew up in Kenya and was educated there, at King's School, Canterbury and at Trinity College, Dublin. He served with the Grenadier Guards in Windsor and Belize and worked in London as a journalist before becoming a full time author. He lives now in Cambridge.

His early books include Happy Valley: The story of the English in Kenya, and Where were you at Waterloo?, a satirical novel of army life. His second novel, Tennis and the Masai,^[1] was later serialised on BBC Radio 4. It told the story of a Kenya prep school similar to Best's own,^[2] where the cricket score arrived by carrier pigeon and runaway boys were hunted down with spearmen and tracker dogs.

Best's most recent book is The Greatest Day in History, a widely acclaimed account of the 1918 Armistice. In 2010, he was long-listed for the Sunday Times short story award with The Souvenir, a satirical account of American furniture salesmen scouring the Amazon for shrunken heads.

Published works

• Happy Valley: The story of the English in Kenya (Secker and Warburg, 1979)
• Where were you at Waterloo? (R. Hale, 1981)
• Tennis and the Masai (Hutchinson, 1986)
• Medieval Britain (with Andy Williams; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995)
• Celtic Britain (with Andy Williams; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995)
• Historic Britain from the air (with Jason Hawkes; Vendome Press, 1995)
• The Presidents of the United States of America (Little, Brown and Co., 1995)
• The Kings and Queens of England (Little, Brown and Co., 1995)
• The Knights Templar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997)
• The Kings and Queens of Scotland (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999)
• London in the Footsteps of the Famous (Bradt Travel Guides, 2002)
• Trafalgar: the untold story of the greatest sea battle in history (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)
• The Greatest Day in History: how the Great War really ended (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008)

References

1. ^ A Life in the Day, London Sunday Times magazine, 25 May 1986
2. ^ "A Corner of a Foreign Field", London Daily Telegraph, 30 August 2003

External links

• Official website
• Author's page at Orion
• The Pembrokians

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