Book description
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, assesses 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.
Hugo Vickers' books include
Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece
;
Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough
;
Cecil Beaton
;
Vivien Leigh
;
Loving Garbo
;
Royal Orders
;
The Private World of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
; and
The Kiss
, which won the 1996 Stern Silver Pen for Non-fiction.
