Anita Arnon

And like I said at the beginning, this is a man who will free six nations from Spanish rule.

So they are Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

And all together, that is an area larger than modern Europe.

Oh, she's amazing.

This is the American liberator.

I just love it so much.

Her biography of Bolivar is fabulous.

And she says that, you know, this is a line from her.

Neither Alexander the Great, nor Hannibal, nor Julius Caesar had fought across such a vast and inhospitable terrain.

Charlemagne's victories would have to have doubled to match Bolivar's.

Napoleon, striving to build an empire, had covered less ground than Bolivar, struggling to win freedom.

Get an idea of what the man represents, particularly in Latin America.

Oh, gosh, I mean, just almost automatically.

So what she does beautifully, she tells a story, she goes through archives, she has scoured the world looking for every item that is relevant.

Yeah, a lot of his stuff does survive.

But apart from that, what she does is she goes through official portraits and she does the measurements for them.

I was so tickled by this.

And what she shows is a man who has a rather meagre chest, quite bandy, thin legs, and hands that have been described by contemporaries as small and beautiful as a woman's.

And she gives us these dimensions, which just doesn't match the Liberator's massive, huge image.

He was only 5'6".