Hardcover book about the Duchess Gladys of Marlborough.

Gladys: Duchess of Marlborough

HUGO VICKERS

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

Writing about Hugo Vickers' last book for Hutchinson, "Elizabeth, The Queen Mother", a succession of fellow biographers applauded Vickers' unique skill. "Masterly ...Hugo Vickers' long immersion in the history and dramatic personae of the Royal Family has certainly paid off". (Selina Hastings). 'A bulging plum pudding of insider snippets', commented Robert Lacey. 'An overall portrait which may well be as close as anyone will ever get to the truth', said Craig Brown. And A.N. Wilson added admiringly, 'There is a small handful of British royal biographies which have acquired classic status ...It is a truly magnificent book. Hugo Vickers knows his subject through and through'. Hugo Vickers has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Royal Family, and has had a fascination with the story of the Duchess of Windsor since he was a young man. There have been a number of books about this doomed couple (and Channel 4 is very interested in doing a programme based on Hugo's text), but this book brings a new perspective on the story by focussing on the later years of exile. While Vickers has his own theories about the Abdication itself, and he makes it very clear that Mrs Simpson did not lure the King from the throne, the drama of this narrative comes from the criminal exploitation of an old sick woman after the death of her husband. She was ruthlessly exploited by a French lawyer called Suzanne Blum. Some members of the Royal Family, like Mountbatten and the Queen Mother, don't emerge with much credit either. Using previously unpublished papers and other personal testaments, Hugo Vickers relates a tragic story which has lost none of its resonance over the years since the Duchess died in 1986.

Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor

History

Hutchinson Radius

Elizabeth, The Queen Mother

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

queen-mother-biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Arrow

Hugo Vickers has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Royal Family, and has had a fascination with the story of the Duchess of Windsor since he was a young man. There have been a number of books about this doomed couple, but this book brings a new perspective on the story by focussing on the later years of exile. While Vickers has his own theories about the Abdication itself, and he makes it very clear that Mrs Simpson did not lure the King from the throne, the drama of this narrative comes from the criminal exploitation of an old sick woman after the death of her husband. She was ruthlessly exploited by a French lawyer called Suzanne Blum. Some members of the Royal Family, like Mountbatten and the Queen Mother, don't emerge with much credit either. Hugo Vickers relates a tragic story which has lost none of its resonance over the years since the Duchess died in 1986.

"In 1953, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Alice was dressed from head to foot in a long grey dress and a grey clock, and a nun's veil. Amidst all the jewels, and velvet and coronets, and the fine uniforms, she exuded an unworldly simplicity. As one who witnessed her process alone up the long aisle of the abbey put it, "she looked as though she were walking into eternity". Seated with the royal family, she was a part of them, yet somehow distanced from them. In as much as she is remembered at all today, it is as this shadowy figure in grey nun's clothes..." Princess Alice, mother of Prince Philip, was something of a mystery figure even within her own family. She was born deaf, at Windsor Castle, in the presence of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and brought up in England, Darmstadt and Malta. In 1903 she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, and from then on her life was overshadowed by wars, revolutions and enforced periods of exile. By the time she was 35, virtually every point of stability was overthrown. Though the British royal family remained in the ascendant, her German family ceased to be ruling princes, her two aunts who had married Russian royalty came to savage ends, and soon afterwards Alice's own husband was nearly executed as a political scapegoat. The middle years of her life, which should have followed a conventional and fulfilling path, did the opposite. She suffered from a serious religious crisis and at the age of 45 was removed from her family and placed in a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she was pronounced a "schizophrenic paranoid". As her stay in the clinic became prolonged, there was a time when it seemed that she might never walk free again. How she achieved her recovery is just one of the remarkable aspects of her story.

Alice : Princess Andrew of Greece

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough

Hamish Hamilton Ltd.

Based on personal reminiscences and private papers, this story involves a group of upper-class English men and women, combining a poignant tale of love and obsession and a mystery.

The kiss: The story of an obsession

Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece

Leaders & Notable People

Although in his lifetime Cecil Beaton – royal photographer and theatrical designer – published six short volumes of his diaries he was shy hurting the feelings of those he wrote about. Hugo Vickers has gone back to the originals to produce the Beaton diaries as they were written. Beaton records a vigorous social life among hostesses such as Emerald Cunard and Sybil Colefax, performers including Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn (on the not wholly successful Alan Jay Lerner-Andre Previn musical, COCO) and Marlene Dietrich, as well as artists from Cocteau and Picasso to Bacon and the young Hockney. Running through the diaries are his friendships with the Queen Mother, with Diana Cooper and Greta Garbo.
In the unexpurgated edition Vickers shows what Beaton really had to say about those with whom he worked. He could be waspish, even brutal. His diaries are frank and uninhibited.

The Unexpurgated Beaton

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Cecil Beaton the Authorized Biography

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Littlehampton Book Services Ltd.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HUGO VICKERS. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by HUGO VICKERS

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HUGO VICKERS. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Gladys: Duchess of Marlborough

Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor

queen-mother-biography

Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor

Alice : Princess Andrew of Greece

Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough

The kiss: The story of an obsession

Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece

The Unexpurgated Beaton

Cecil Beaton the Authorized Biography