British · b. 1941
Frank McLynn is a British biographer and historian, born in 1941. He won an open scholarship in classics to Wadham College, Oxford, took a doctorate at the University of London, and was a visiting professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Strathclyde from 1996 to 2001. Writing for a general audience, he has produced a long run of large-scale lives and narrative histories: biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson, Carl Jung, Richard Burton, Henry Morton Stanley, Napoleon, Marcus Aurelius and Genghis Khan, as well as 1759, on the year Britain became master of the world, and books on the Jacobites, the Mexican Revolution and the overland trails of the American West. His Napoleon (1997) is known for reading the Emperor through depth psychology and for arguing that he was poisoned with arsenic on St Helena. Reviewers praise his range and storytelling, while some fault his taste for psychological speculation.