Philip Ziegler

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.

Works Duchess of Dino (1962) on Princess Dorothea of Courland Addington: A Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (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 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)