Edward viii official biography

This account of the life of Edward VIII fills in some blanks about the king.
Originally intending to be a novelist, he began a career as biographer with his life of Talleyrand's lover, the Duchess of Dino.
In this masterly authorized biography, Philip Ziegler reveals the complex personality of Edward VIII, the only British monarch to have voluntarily renounced the.

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King Edward VIII

September 9, 2022

For an "authorized" biography, Philip Ziegler's King Edward VIII paints a remarkably unflattering portrait. The King who was once, and in some circles still is, romanticized for abdicating his throne "for the woman I love" has undergone a drubbing in recent decades, as his personal foibles and fascist sympathies have inspired heavy scrutiny. Ziegler's book, perhaps the most thorough and "definitive" work on this ill-starred ruler, tries to be generous to Edward but finds little to be generous about. His early life is a rake's progress of romantic liaisons, drunken escapades and academic failures, interrupted by uneventful military service and occasional diplomatic tours. Ziegler unsparingly shows Edward's vapidity: his private letters, well into adulthood, read like the diary of a middle schooler who never mastered the English language, while his public utterances rarely aspired to the banal. He tries to balance this intellectual nullity with comments on Edward's charm and charisma, his good looks, his charitable causes (he was, quite honorably

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King Edward VIII

Edward was the twentieth century's Prince Charming. He was handsome, eloquent, quick-witted, charismatic, a dazzling foil to his stuffy royal parents. He was a popular hero who saw firsthand the hell of the trenches in the Great War, who raged at the miseries of the Depression, who adored jazz, danced the night away and seemed the very embodiment of a new democratic royalty that would rule the greatest empire on earth. When he became King in 1936, only those closest to him knew that this radiant image could not -- and would not -- endure; even insiders were scarcely prepared for the appalling scandal and shock when, a mere eleven months later, his reign abruptly ended with a nighttime journey to France and marriage to an American divorcee. Drawing on Edward's extremely frank and explicit diaries, on his two thousand love letters (long assumed to have been destroyed) and on the private and secret papers of Baldwin, Chamberlain and Churchill, Ziegler enables us to see the man, for the first time, as he was. - Jacket flap.