In my case, I belong to a group of aspiring and practicing biographers in Boston. We meet once a month for a coupla hours. It's become my lifeline - forgive the pun.

I belong to the Boston Biographers Group - and get my monthly 'fix' from them. Where else can I sit down for two hours with people who understand the challenge I face, daily, as a life-chronicler?

I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.

I grew up and lived in a Britain in which strikes and the threat of strikes had become part of the social fabric - and it was not very nice.

The White House tapes, recording Nixon's nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress.

Both JFK and George W. Bush were the sons of wealthy U.S. ambassadors and thus privileged to meet distinguished figures, to travel, and to see the world and think about its problems if they chose.