Books with author Hugo Vickers

An authoritative and affectionate biography of the Late Queen Mother.Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s life spanned the entire 20th century and through that century she witnessed decades of dramatic change, not least within her own family. Following her carefree and untroubled childhood she stepped into the public domain as the wife of a king, where she triumphed with her stoic support of the monarchy and her country and, after her husband’s death, with her oldest daughter Queen Elizabeth II, she remained a key player in the unfolding drama of Britain’s Royal Family.The book is published to coincide with the third anniversary of the Queen Mother’s death.

An authoritative and affectionate biography of the Late Queen Mother.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