Description
In the years before the First World War, the great European powers, Britain, Germany and Russia, were ruled by three cousins: George V, King-Emperor of England, the British Empire and India; Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser; and Nicholas II, the last Tsar. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war which set twentieth century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world. Miranda Carter uses the cousins� correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. The Three Emperors is a brilliant and sometimes hilarious portrait of three men � damaged, egotistical Wilhelm, quiet, stubborn Nicholas and anxious, dutiful George � and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria � grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third � whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and of Edward VII, the playboy �arch-vulgarian� who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time it weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War One, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect. For all three men the war would be a disaster which destroyed for ever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.
About the Author
M J Carter, biographer, historian and thriller writer, was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School and Exeter College, Oxford. She worked as a publisher and journalist before beginning research on her biography of Anthony Blunt in 1994. She lives in London with her husband and two sons.Anthony Blunt: His lives(2001), her first book, won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Orwell Prize, and was shortlisted for many other prizes, including theGuardianFirst Book Award and the Whitbread Biography Award. In the US it was chosen by theNew York Times Book Reviewas one of the seven best books of 2002. Her second book, The Three Emperors (US title, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm), was published in 2009 and was shortlisted for the LA Time Biography prize and the Hesse-Tiltman History prize. In 2014 her first thriller, The Strangler Vine, the first in a series set in the first years f Queen Victoria's reign, will be published. The second in the series, The Infidel Stain, is due for publication in January 2015.
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