Ferdinand MountFerdinand Mount was born in 1939, the son of a steeplechase jockey, and brought up on Salisbury Plain. After being educated at Eton and Oxford, he made various false starts as a children's nanny, a gossip columnist, bagman to Selwyn Lloyd, andleader-writer on the doomed Daily Sketch. He later surfaced, slightly to his surprise and everyone else's, as head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit and later editor of The Times Literary Supplement. Apart from political columns and essays, he has written a six-volume series of novels, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with The Man Who Rode Ampersand, based on his father's racing life, and included Of Love And Asthma, which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. He also writes what he calls Tales of History and Imagination, including Umbrella, which the historian Niall Ferguson called 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'. His most recent titles for Bloomsbury Continuum include Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality, Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall, from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson, Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca and the novel Making Nice. Read More Read Less