Nigel Jones (born 1951) is a British journalist and biographer. Early life Born in Woking, Surrey, he spent childhood in Surrey, Sussex, Kent and rural Yorkshire. He was educated at schools in the Isle of Wight and North Wales. His journalistic career began on local newspapers in Hertfordshire and the Cambridge Evening News where he was Crown Court correspondent. He then spent almost two years in Germany, learning the language, studying the history and working in factories in Karlsruhe, Reutlingen and Berlin. Career In the 1980s he worked for the Press Association news agency in London and as an editor with BBC and Independent Radio News IRN. His first book, The War Walk: A Journey along the Western Front (1983), was inspired by his father, Frank Jones (1890-1970), a Great War veteran. For the book he walked along the trench lines of the Western front, interviewing more than 30 veterans of the conflict. Among these was the German author and war hero Ernst Jünger. His stay with Jünger inspired his second book, Hitler's Heralds: the story of the Freikorps 1918-1923 (1987. Reissued in 2004 as A Brief History of the birth of the Nazis). His third book was inspired by the discovery in 1988 of an archive of letters, papers and manuscripts of the English novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) which were bequeathed to him by Hamilton's sister-in-law, Aileen Hamilton, and used in his biography of Hamilton, Through a Glass Darkly (1990 : reissued 2008). In 1991 Jones moved to Vienna, Austria, where he joined the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) and broadcast worldwide on Radio Austria International. It was at this time that his only stage play End of the Night, based on the life of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine, was produced at Brighton's Pavilion Theatre in November 1991. Returning to England in 1995, he worked as a freelance journalist for The Guardian and The Spectator while writing his biography of the poet Rupert Brooke, Life, Death and Myth (1999). He was deputy editor of History Today magazine (1999-2000) and reviews editor of BBC History Magazine (2000-2003). His next book was a brief life of Britain's Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, Mosley, published by Haus in 2004. His recent publications include a history of the plots to assassinate Hitler, Countdown to Valkyrie, published by Frontline Books in January 2009, and Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London,