Shane Leslie

Writer / biographer Shane Leslie was born in Ireland in 1885. His father was an Irish baronet (related to Winston Churchill and Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell) and his mother was an American from New York. He was educated at Eton College in England and Kings College in Cambridge. He graduated in 1907 and traveled to Russia, where he met and became friends with the writer Lev Tolstoy. He later traveled to the US, where he met Marjorie Ide, the daughter of the US Ambassador to Spain, and married her. He returned to London, where he secured a position as a literary reviewer on the London "Sunday Times" and the "Daily Telegraph". He has written novels, historical works and even books of poetry, but is probably best known for his biographies of such figures as Jonathan Swift. He died in 1971 in Ireland.