Hillary Clinton has said that Donald Trump's presence next to her during last year's presidential debates made her so uncomfortable her "skin crawled".

She writes in a forthcoming book that she became so uneasy at points during her TV appearances with the now US President she had to resist shouting out: "Back up you creep, get away from me."

The losing candidate in the 2017 presidential election said she struggled to stay composed during a crucial face-off in St Louis on 9 October.

Two days earlier, the campaign had been rocked by the release of footage of Mr Trump bragging aggressively about groping women.

Image: The debate took place days after footage emerged of Mr Trump bragging about groping women

She writes: "This is not OK, I thought. It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me.


"Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces.

"It was incredibly uncomfortable he was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled."

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Mrs Clinton made history as the first women to be nominated to run for the presidency by the Democrats or the Republicans.

She says the only way she was able to stay calm was to draw on a lifetime of experience of dealing with "difficult men trying to throw me off".

The highly anticipated memoir, called What Happened, sees the former first lady analyse her doomed campaign.

Advance sales ahead of its release in the US on 12 September have already pushed it to number one on Amazon's list of bestsellers.

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The excerpts were read out on US cable news channel MSNBC.

Mrs Clinton has previously said that she spent much of the year writing the book to pull back the curtain on the strategies and failures of her campaign following a period of reflection.

In the excerpts, she admits feeling as though she has let down the American people.

"Writing this wasn't easy. Every day that I was a candidate for president, I knew that millions of people were counting on me and I couldn't bear the idea of letting them down. But I did," she writes.