Total Page : 528
Publisher : Knopf
Publication Date : 2010 03 23
>> Origins of First World War
I rather expected this heavy tome to be heavy going I was pleasantly surprised to find it moved at a brisk pace was skillfully written and told a ripping good tale The period covered the events of the last decades of the 19th century and leading up to the first World War has not been the focus of much literary attention in recent years Miranda Carter using a plethora of primary and secondary sources brings this period to vivid life The three royal personages of the title George V Tsar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm prove remarkably interesting considering they were either ordinary or worse than ordinary They ruled during the last years of European royalty and only the English king managed to survive the Great War I look forward to finding some of the historical sources listed in the comprehensive bibliography for further reading This book is an excellent starting point on the origins of World War I and the characters of its royal protagonists
>> Repetition
Pay no attention to the stars amazon required that I give a rating in order to comment I haven t read this book yet but I wonder how this book is different from King Kaiser Tsar which came out I believe in 2008 and was very good It explored the SAME topic and the titles are eerily similar
>> What an awful family
I have long held the belief that had Queen Victoria lived until she was 95 instead of dying in January 1901 at the age of 81 she might have boxed the ears of two Georgie of England and Willy of Germany of her grandsons and the husband Nicky of Russia of one of her grand daughters George Nicholas and Wilhelm of the title and many millions might not have died in the Great War But Victoria was obviously as ignorant and tiny minded as the rest of the royals and may well have been as unwilling to call the others to order as they were to call themselves to order
This well researched book provides plenty of proof of the ignorance and tiny mindedness of these people and is therefore fascinating and rewarding in its own right But it also gives a disturbing insight into what many of us know already namely that Victoria s family carried on a long royal tradition of being dysfunctional Not to put too fine a point on it many members of the family were quite nasty probably certifiable by modern standards and positively dangerous because of the power that they wielded
Of course two of the emperors Willy and Nicky were autocrats running autocracies and that has grave and inherent dangers But Georgie was a would be autocrat too not only in his outlook on the world but also within his family Thankfully he was kept in check by successive Prime Ministers under our British constitutional monarchy system unlike the other emperors who were barely checked at all
As to the most notorious of all of the extraordinarily awful episodes involving the cousins that of Georgie s selfish refusal to extend succour and sanctuary to Nicky in 1917 the author expresses her revulsion in a manner that is restrained whereas I would have gone for the jugular King George V Emperor of India but of German blood like his imperial cousins disgraced his adopted British Empire and brought everlasting shame on his adopted imperial subjects
Miranda Carter also mentions briefly another curious and seemingly cowardly act of King George V that of changing his family name from the German Saxe Coburg Gotha to the stick a pin in a map of England one of Windsor So much for this family s love of heritage and history
It is interesting to speculate too that given the mad and dangerous examples of this family that Ms Carter has studied in such depth and given the importance that they and others attached and attach to heredity if it is wise for anyone nowadays to place much store by the sanity and safeness of those of the descendants still living I don t intend to divulge for this review those whom I might have in mind but readers can infer what they want from my words
The downside of this otherwise excellent literary effort is that the author seems to have set out to entertain her readers as well as to educate them and sometimes just sometimes her language is too slanted towards entertainment and is not as elegant as that used by more experienced historians Nevertheless I give it five stars and recommend it without hesitation
