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Book Synopsis Edward VIII (Penguin Monarchs) by : Piers Brendon
Download or read book Edward VIII (Penguin Monarchs) written by Piers Brendon and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'After my death,' George V said of his eldest son and heir, 'the boy will ruin himself within twelve months.' The forecast proved uncannily accurate. Edward VIII came to the throne in January 1936, provoked a constitutional crisis by his determination to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, and abdicated in December. He was never crowned king. In choosing the woman he loved over his royal birthright, Edward shook the monarchy to its foundations. Given the new title 'Duke of Windsor' and essentially sent into exile, he remained a visible skeleton in the royal cupboard until his death in 1972 and he haunts the house of Windsor to this day. Drawing on unpublished material, notably correspondence with his most loyal (though much tried) supporter Winston Churchill, Piers Brendon's superb biography traces Edward's tumultuous public and private life from bright young prince to troubled sovereign, from wartime colonial governor to sad but glittering expatriate. With pace and panache, it cuts through the myths that still surround this most controversial of modern British monarchs.
Book Synopsis Victoria (Penguin Monarchs) by : Jane Ridley
Download or read book Victoria (Penguin Monarchs) written by Jane Ridley and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the Penguin Monarchs series: short, fresh, expert accounts of England's rulers in a collectible format Queen Victoria inherited the throne at 18 and went on to become the longest-reigning female monarch in history, in a time of intense industrial, cultural, political, scientific and military change within the United Kingdom and great imperial expansion outside of it (she was made Empress of India in 1876). Overturning the established picture of the dour old lady, this is a fresh and engaging portrait from one of our most talented royal biographers. Jane Ridley is Professor of Modern History at Buckingham University, where she teaches a course on biography. Her previous books include The Young Disraeli; a study of Edwin Lutyens, The Architect and his Wife, which won the 2003 Duff Cooper Prize; and the best-selling Bertie: A Life of Edward VII. A Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, Ridley writes for the Spectator and other newspapers, and has appeared on radio and several television documentaries. She lives in London and Scotland.
Book Synopsis Edward VII (Penguin Monarchs) by : Richard Davenport-Hines
Download or read book Edward VII (Penguin Monarchs) written by Richard Davenport-Hines and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like his mother Queen Victoria, Edward VII defined an era. Both reflected the personalties of their central figures: hers grand, imperial and pretty stiff; his no less grand, but much more relaxed and enjoyable. This book conveys Edward's distinct personality and significant influences. To the despair of his parents, he rebelled as a young man, conducting many affairs and living a life of pleasure. But as king he made a distinct contribution to European diplomacy and - which is little known - to London, laying out the Mall and Admiralty Arch. Richard Davenport-Hines's book is as enjoyable as its subject and the age he made.
Book Synopsis George V (Penguin Monarchs) by : David Cannadine
Download or read book George V (Penguin Monarchs) written by David Cannadine and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a man with such conventional tastes and views, George V had a revolutionary impact. Almost despite himself he marked a decisive break with his flamboyant predecessor Edward VII, inventing the modern monarchy, with its emphasis on frequent public appearances, family values and duty. George V was an effective war-leader and inventor of 'the House of Windsor'. In an era of ever greater media coverage--frequently filmed and initiating the British Empire Christmas broadcast--George became for 25 years a universally recognised figure. He was also the only British monarch to take his role as Emperor of India seriously. While his great rivals (Tsar Nicolas and Kaiser Wilhelm) ended their reigns in catastrophe, he plodded on. David Cannadine's sparkling account of his reign could not be more enjoyable, a masterclass in how to write about Monarchy, that central--if peculiar--pillar of British life.
Book Synopsis Henry I (Penguin Monarchs) by : Edmund King
Download or read book Henry I (Penguin Monarchs) written by Edmund King and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'To be a medieval king was a job of work ... This was a man who knew how to run a complex organization. He was England's CEO' The youngest of William the Conqueror's sons, Henry I came to unchallenged power only after two of his brothers died in strange hunting accidents and he had imprisoned the other. He was destined to become one of the greatest of all medieval monarchs, both through his own ruthlessness, and through his dynastic legacy. Edmund King's engrossing portrait shows a strikingly charismatic, intelligent and fortunate man, whose rule was looked back on as the real post-conquest founding of England as a new realm: wealthy, stable, bureaucratised and self-confident.
Book Synopsis Edward VI (Penguin Monarchs) by : Stephen Alford
Download or read book Edward VI (Penguin Monarchs) written by Stephen Alford and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2014-12-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII, became king at the age of nine and died wholly unexpectedly at the age of fifteen. All around him loomed powerful men who hoped to use the child to further their own ends, but who were also playing a long game - assuming that Edward would long outlive them and become as commanding a figure as his father had been. Stephen Alford's wonderful book gives full play to the murky, sinister nature of Edward's reign, but is also a poignant account of a boy learning to rule, learning to enjoy his growing power and to come out of the shadows of the great aristocrats around him. England's last child monarch, Edward would have led his country in a quite different direction to the catastrophic one caused by his death.
Book Synopsis George III (Penguin Monarchs) by : Jeremy Black
Download or read book George III (Penguin Monarchs) written by Jeremy Black and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King of Britain for sixty years and the last king of what would become the United States, George III inspired both hatred and loyalty and is now best known for two reasons: as a villainous tyrant for America's Founding Fathers, and for his madness, both of which have been portrayed on stage and screen. In this concise and penetrating biography, Jeremy Black turns away from the image-making and back to the archives, and instead locates George's life within his age: as a king who faced the loss of key colonies, rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in London, constitutional crisis in Britain and an existential threat from Revolutionary France as part of modern Britain's longest period of war. Black shows how George III rose to these challenges with fortitude and helped settle parliamentary monarchy as an effective governmental system, eventually becoming the most popular monarch for well over a century. He also shows us a talented and curious individual, committed to music, art, architecture and science, who took the duties of monarchy seriously, from reviewing death penalties to trying to control his often wayward children even as his own mental health failed, and became Britain's longest reigning king.
Book Synopsis Edward IV (Penguin Monarchs) by : A J Pollard
Download or read book Edward IV (Penguin Monarchs) written by A J Pollard and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1461 Edward earl of March, an able, handsome, and charming eighteen-year old, usurped the English throne from his feeble Lancastrian predecessor Henry VI. Ten years on, following outbreaks of civil conflict that culminated in him losing, then regaining the crown, he had finally secured his kingdom. The years that followed witnessed a period of rule that has been described as a golden age: a time of peace and economic and industrial expansion, which saw the establishment of a style of monarchy that the Tudors would later develop. Yet, argues A. J. Pollard, Edward, who was drawn to a life of sexual and epicurean excess, was a man of limited vision, his reign remaining to the very end the narrow rule of a victorious faction in civil war. Ultimately, his failure was dynastic: barely two months after his death in April 1483, the throne was usurped by Edward's youngest brother, Richard III.
Book Synopsis Richard III (Penguin Monarchs) by : Rosemary Horrox
Download or read book Richard III (Penguin Monarchs) written by Rosemary Horrox and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No English king has so divided opinion, both during his reign and in the centuries since, more than Richard III. He was loathed in his own time for the never-confirmed murder of his young nephews, the Princes in the Tower, and died fighting his own subjects on the battlefield. This is the vision of Richard we have inherited from Shakespeare. Equally, he inspired great loyalty in his followers. In this enlightening, even-handed study, Rosemary Horrox builds a complex picture of a king who by any standard failed as a monarch. He was killed after only two years on the throne, without an heir, and brought such a decisive end to the House of York that Henry Tudor was able to seize the throne, despite his extremely tenuous claim. Whether Richard was undone by his own fierce ambitions, or by the legacy of a Yorkist dynasty which was already profoundly dysfunctional, the end result was the same: Richard III destroyed the very dynasty that he had spent his life so passionately defending.
Book Synopsis Edward VI (Penguin Monarchs) by : Stephen Alford
Download or read book Edward VI (Penguin Monarchs) written by Stephen Alford and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII, became king at the age of nine and died wholly unexpectedly at the age of fifteen. All around him loomed powerful men who hoped to use the child to further their own ends, but who were also playing a long game - assuming that Edward would long outlive them and become as commanding a figure as his father had been. Stephen Alford's wonderful book gives full play to the murky, sinister nature of Edward's reign, but is also a poignant account of a boy learning to rule, learning to enjoy his growing power and to come out of the shadows of the great aristocrats around him. England's last child monarch, Edward would have led his country in a quite different direction to the catastrophic one caused by his death.
Book Synopsis Athelstan (Penguin Monarchs) by : Tom Holland
Download or read book Athelstan (Penguin Monarchs) written by Tom Holland and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The formation of England occurred against the odds: an island divided into rival kingdoms, under savage assault from Viking hordes. But, after King Alfred ensured the survival of Wessex and his son Edward expanded it, his grandson Athelstan inherited the rule of both Mercia and Wessex, conquered Northumbria and was hailed as Rex totius Britanniae: 'King of the whole of Britain'. Tom Holland recounts this extraordinary story with relish and drama, transporting us back to a time of omens, raven harbingers and blood-red battlefields. As well as giving form to the figure of Athelstan - devout, shrewd, all too aware of the precarious nature of his power, especially in the north - he introduces the great figures of the age, including Alfred and his daughter Aethelflaed, 'Lady of the Mercians', who brought Athelstan up at the Mercian court. Making sense of the family rivalries and fractious conflicts of the Anglo-Saxon rulers, Holland shows us how a royal dynasty rescued their kingdom from near-oblivion and fashioned a nation that endures to this day.
Book Synopsis Edward III (Penguin Monarchs) by : Jonathan Sumption
Download or read book Edward III (Penguin Monarchs) written by Jonathan Sumption and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward III lived through bloody and turbulent times. His father was deposed by his mother and her lover when he was still a teenager; a third of England's population was killed by the Black Death midway through his reign; and the intractable Hundred Years War with France began under his leadership. Yet Edward managed to rule England for fifty years, and was viewed as a paragon of kingship in the eyes of both his contemporaries and later generations. Venerated as the victor of Sluys and Crécy and the founder of the Order of the Garter, he was regarded with awe even by his enemies. But he lived too long, and was ultimately condemned to see thirty years of conquests reversed in less than five. In this gripping new account of Edward III's rise and fall, Jonathan Sumption introduces us to a fêted king who ended his life a heroic failure.
Book Synopsis Oliver Cromwell (Penguin Monarchs) by : David Horspool
Download or read book Oliver Cromwell (Penguin Monarchs) written by David Horspool and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although he styled himself 'His Highness', adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors, and lived in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him. Yet, as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector, Cromwell, the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry, wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power, shaped by a decade-long civil war, saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews, a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it, Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies, and probably to most of his countrymen, his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.
Book Synopsis Henry V (Penguin Monarchs) by : Anne Curry
Download or read book Henry V (Penguin Monarchs) written by Anne Curry and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foremost medieval historian Anne Curry offers a new reinterpretation of Henry V and the battle that defined his kingship: Agincourt Henry V's invasion of France, in August 1415, represented a huge gamble. As heir to the throne, he had been a failure, cast into the political wilderness amid rumours that he planned to depose his father. Despite a complete change of character as king - founding monasteries, persecuting heretics, and enforcing the law to its extremes - little had gone right since. He was insecure in his kingdom, his reputation low. On the eve of his departure for France, he uncovered a plot by some of his closest associates to remove him from power. Agincourt was a battle that Henry should not have won - but he did, and the rest is history. Within five years, he was heir to the throne of France. In this vivid new interpretation, Anne Curry explores how Henry's hyperactive efforts to expunge his past failures, and his experience of crisis - which threatened to ruin everything he had struggled to achieve - defined his kingship, and how his astonishing success at Agincourt transformed his standing in the eyes of his contemporaries, and of all generations to come.
Download or read book George VI written by Sarah Bradford and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of George VI, the hero of The King's Speech George VI reigned through taxing times. Acceding to the throne upon his brother's abdication, he was immediately confronted with the turmoil in European politics leading up to the Second World War, then the War itself, followed by a period of austerity, social transformation and loss of Empire. George was unprepared for kingship, suffering from a stammer which could make public occasions very painful for him. Moreover he had grown up in the shadow of his brother, a man who had been idolized as no royal prince has been, before or since. However, as Sarah Bradford shows in this sympathetic biography, although George was not born to be king, he died a great one. 'A triumph ... Sarah Bradford looks set to inherit Lady Longford's mantle as royal biographer supreme' Mail on Sunday 'Lucid, convincing and admirably fair ... George VI has been fortunate in his biographer' Philip Ziegler 'Vivid, thorough and enjoyable' Independent Sarah Bradford is a historian and biographer. Her books include Cesare Borgia (1976), Disraeli (1982), winner of the New York Times Book of the Year, Princess Grace (1984), Sacherevell Sitwell (1993), Elizabeth: A Biography of Her Majesty the Queen (1996), America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (2000), Lucrezia Borgia (2005) and Diana (2007).She lives in London and is married to the 8th Viscount Bangor. She is currently working on a full scale biography of Queen Victoria.
Download or read book Playboy Princes written by Peter Beer and published by Peter Owen Publishers. This book was released on 2016-07-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating dual biography proves that controversial Royal Family members are not necessarily only a feature of late 20th- or 21st-century lifeEdward VII (1841-1910) and his grandson Edward VIII (1894-1972) were born in different eras, but it is illuminating to compare the early and middle years of the two Princes of Wales as kings in waiting and discover how their youth informed their years on the British throne. The privileges of rank aside, they were heirs to an unenviable role, and this study presents a unique portrait of strained apprenticeships for which there was no satisfactory precedent. Theirs was an upbringing dictated by dogmatic prescription and the heavy weight of obligation. As they pursued their lives according to their distinct personalities, they were never relieved of parental strictures, especially with regard to Queen Victoria and her eldest son, who filled the void with shallow interests, a profligate style of living, and the delights of Parisian nightlife. Inevitably the two princes were consigned to filling much of their time with insubstantial engagements not best suited to their characters and which reveal a common vulnerability. In the case of the future Edward VIII, he took a jaundiced view of matters of state and preferred dance floors, riding to hounds, and the ministrations of lovers. This book is the story of the heirs' progress that provides often unexpected perspectives on two public figures better known through the history of their respective reigns. For readers in this era, the similar position of Prince Charles ensures that this survey is a timely as well as a surprisingly entertaining read.
Book Synopsis Edward III (Penguin Monarchs) by : Jonathan Sumption
Download or read book Edward III (Penguin Monarchs) written by Jonathan Sumption and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward III lived through bloody and turbulent times. His father was deposed by his mother and her lover when he was still a teenager; a third of England's population was killed by the Black Death midway through his reign; and the intractable Hundred Years War with France began under his leadership. Yet Edward managed to rule England for fifty years, and was viewed as a paragon of kingship in the eyes of both his contemporaries and later generations. Venerated as the victor of Sluys and Crécy and the founder of the Order of the Garter, he was regarded with awe even by his enemies. But he lived too long, and was ultimately condemned to see thirty years of conquests reversed in less than five. In this gripping new account of Edward III's rise and fall, Jonathan Sumption introduces us to a fêted king who ended his life a heroic failure.
