Never usually one to do anything without great fanfare, Niall Ferguson, the bombastic television historian, has quietly married Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch MP, who lives under a fatwa after writing the screenplay for Submission, a film critical of Islam.
Henry Kissinger, the former American secretary of state, who was the subject of a biography by Ferguson, 47, was among the guests at the wedding in Boston, Massachusetts. He provided Ferguson with access to his White House diaries and letters for what the historian calls a “warts-and-all biography”.
None of the Harvard historianÂ’s three children are understood to have been at the ceremony. He divorced their mother, Sue Douglas, a former newspaper editor, to whom he was married for 17 years, amid much tabloid coverage last year.
Ali, 41, who lives under police protection in America after the assassination in 2004 of Theo van Gogh, the director of Submission, is due to give birth to the coupleÂ’s first child in the next few months. The couple met at party in May 2009. |