Annal:1998 Whitbread Book Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 1998. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Whitbread Book Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
- 1998 Whitbread-Biography winner
- Score: 10.48
The winner of Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Prize and a bestseller there for months, this wonderfully readable biography offers a rich, rollicking picture of late-eighteenth-century British aristocracy and the intimate story of a woman who for a time was its undisputed leader.
Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day. In 1774, at the age of seventeen, Georgiana achieved immediate celebrity by marrying one of England’s richest and most influential aristocrats, the Duke of Devonshire. Launched into a world of wealth and power, she quickly became the queen of fashionable society, adored by the Prince of Wales, a dear friend of Marie-Antoinette, and leader of the most important salon of her time. Not content with the role of society hostess, she used her connections to enter politics, eventually becoming more influential than most of the men who held office.
Her good works and social exploits made her loved by the multitudes, but Georgiana’s public success, like Diana’s, concealed a personal life…
Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch
- 1998 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.48
Author and literary critic John Bayley was married to novelist Iris Murdoch until her death in February 1999. In this memoir he recounts their life together, up to and including their realization that Dame Iris was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Hitler: Volume 1. 1889-1936 Hubris
- 1998 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.48
The most powerful account of Hitler’s domination of the German people through fanaticism, divisiveness, and luck. From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without equal in this century.
Ian Kershaw’s Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his thirty-year ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that had tried and rejected democracy in the crippling aftermath of World War I. With extraordinary vividness, Kershaw recreates the settings that made Hitler’s rise possible: the virulent anti-Semitism of prewar Vienna, the crucible of a war with immense casualties, the toxic nationalism that gripped Bavaria in the 1920s, the undermining of the Weimar Republic by extremists of the Right and the Left,…
