Elizabeth, The Queen Mother

Oct 9, 2024 6:18 AM

Author:Hugo Vickers

Harold Nicolson called her 'the greatest Queen since Cleopatra', while Cecil Beaton called her 'a marshmallow made on a welding machine'. Stephen Tennant said: 'She looked everything that she was not: gentle, gullible, tenderness mingled with dispassionate serenity, cool, well-bred, remote. Behind this veil she schemed and vacillated, hard as nails.' Who was she?

The Queen Mother's story has not yet been properly told. This was partly due to her long life, and the difficulty that always exists when a biography of a living person is attempted, partly because she was a queen - and the real person gets hidden behind the perceived image - and partly because she is hard to pin down.

From her privileged aristocratic childhood, to the abdication and the problems with Diana - this book questions how she faced her challenges and crises, assess her role, how powerful she was, and how she coped. This is a candid, personal portrait of one of Britain's most loved national treasures.

Hugo Vickers, an acknowledged expert on the House of Windsor, has spent seventeen years researching this book, and observed the Queen Mother in public and private over a period of forty years.

Reviews

As close as anyone will get to the truth

—— Craig Brown , Mail on Sunday

A rare, authoritative and welcome book

—— The Scotsman

richly textured and judicious, and I doubt it will ever be bettered

—— Sunday Telegraph

Gripping gloriously gossipy beautifully detailed, fair but never fawning - arguably the best royal biography of recent years (there has, of course, been competition...)

—— Gyles Brandreth , The Telegraph

Comprehensive ... Darwin's erudition allows him to skirt around the narrow orthodoxies of apologist v critic and provide an insightful account of Britain's unlikely period of global hegemony

—— Sunday Times

John Darwin's Unfinished Empire surpasses even his own previous work to give an unmatched overview of imperial Britain's rise and fall

—— Stephen Howe , Independent BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Uglow is being modest: her long and leisurely stroll through 2.000 years of British gardening is dense with the foliage of historical research, and highly decorated with literary references and colourful anecdotes

—— Independent on Sunday

Enthralling...an elegant and witty gem

—— Herald

In this pacey retelling of a classic love story, Kate Williams has created a sparkling life worthy of Emma herself. A new biography for a new generation

—— Stella Tillyard, author of A Royal Affair

Popular history at its best

—— David Liss, author of A Spectacle of Corruption

Every intricate detail is laid out, and Kate Williams' writing is so immediate, you feel all but transported...

—— Birmingham Post

From Soho tart to glamour model, diplomatic wife in Naples to the most famous extra-marital passion in UK history: Emma Hamilton's amazing tale is hardly unfamiliar. Williams tells it shrewdly and well, with access to recently discovered letters and a sharp contemporary spin. In her skilled hands, Lord Nelson's lover, for all her "charisma, intelligence and charm" falls foul both of ingrained misogyny and a fledgling culture that both gave her stardom and exacted a fearsome price.

—— The Independent

Lively, sympathetic and meticulously researched

—— Sunday Telegraph

Williams account is both balanced and evocative...[Emma Hamilton's] ruthless but romantic pursuit of celebrity is so close to our own time that the story barely needs contemporary parallels

—— Sunday Times

Divertingly and instructively illuminates a time and culture both far away and intriguingly like our own, and resurrects a woman whose mingled vulnerability and resilience - to say nothing of her glamour - still have the power to fascinate

—— Washington Post

The first self-made superstar, the first manipulative media celebrity, dazzling Europe with her style and beauty as muse to artists and mistress to Nelson ... Emma famously gets her comeuppance, and her headlong flight to romantic destruction is told with novelistic dash

—— The Times

Rigorous and relevant

—— TLS 'Books of the Year'

Pries open the most astounding archives to uncover what our recent ancestors tried to hide

—— Sunday Times 'Books of the Year'

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