Nicholas Wapshott has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher
Summary
It is well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close allies and kindred political spirits. During their eight overlapping years in office, the U.S. president and the U.K. prime minister worked together to promote lower taxes, deregulation, free trade, and an aggressive stance against the Soviet Union. But according to Nicholas Wapshott, the Reagan/Thatcher relationship was much deeper than an alliance of mutual interests. Drawing on interviews with those closest to them, as well as on hundreds of recently declassified private letters and telephone calls, Wapshott depicts a more complex, personal, and sometimes argumentative relationship than has previously been revealed.
©2007 Nicholas Wapshott (P)2007 Tantor
The Sphinx
Summary
Before Pearl Harbor, before the Nazi invasion of Poland, America teetered between the desire for isolation and the threat of world war. May 1938. Franklin Delano Roosevelt - recently reelected to a second term as president - sat in the Oval Office and contemplated two possibilities: the rule of fascism overseas, and a third term. With Hitler's reach extending into Austria, and with the atrocities of World War I still fresh in the American memory, Roosevelt faced the question that would prove one of the most defining in American history: whether to once again go to war in Europe. In The Sphinx, Nicholas Wapshott recounts how an ambitious and resilient Roosevelt - nicknamed "the Sphinx" for his cunning, cryptic rapport with the press - devised and doggedly pursued a strategy to sway the American people to abandon isolationism and take up the mantle of the world's most powerful nation. Chief among Roosevelt's antagonists was his friend Joseph P. Kennedy, a stock market magnate and the patriarch of what was to become one of the nation's most storied dynasties. Kennedy's financial, political, and personal interests aligned him with a war-weary American public, and he counted among his isolationist allies no less than Walt Disney, William Randolph Hearst, and Henry Ford - prominent businessmen who believed America had no business in conflicts across the Atlantic. The ensuing battle - waged with fiery rhetoric, agile diplomacy, media sabotage, and petty political antics - would land US troops in Europe within three years, secure Roosevelt's legacy, and set a standard for American military strategy for years to come. With millions of lives - and a future paradigm of foreign intervention - hanging in the balance, The Sphinx captures a political giant at the height of his powers and an American identity crisis that continues to this day.
©2015 Nicholas Wapshott (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Keynes Hayek
Summary
As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore the balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Friedrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.
©2011 Nicholas Wapshott (P)2011 Tantor