Eminent Georgians: The Lives of King George V, Elizabeth Bowen, st John Philby, & Nancy Astor

By John Halperin

Book Overview

King George V, a monarch often deemed stodgy and reactionary; Elizabeth Bowen, a brilliant Anglo-Irish writer, exposed as a World War II English spy monitoring her native Ireland; St. John Philby, father of the notorious spy Kim Philby; and Nancy Astor, an American divorcee who became the first female member of Parliament, make up the quartet of personalities through which John Halperin explores a world of intrigue existing just below the glittering surface of Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Describing the age as simultaneously conventional and progressive, Victorian and modern, Halperin considers the impact that these leading figures had on their era, as well as the extent to which they themselves were shaped by the age in which they lived.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312126611
• ISBN13: 9780312126612
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Intriguing lives, lazily written

This certainly isn't Lytton Strachey. Like Strachey and Richard Holmes, however, Halperin well realizes the inherent great enjoyability of very short biographies of extremely interesting people. There seems to be almost no original research here, and Halperin is willing to make an extremely shallow and lazy transition to an anecdote just to squeeze it in, but he does write with grace (and has an eye for a great story). Oddly, there's a running theme throughout the book: the perfidy of what Halperin extremely loosely calls "treason," although what he means by treason seems so broad at times as to be almost meaningless. The best lives here are of the stodgy George V and the hilariously irreverent Nancy Astor, because with both Halperin seems really to have a new angle he wants to bring out; while his willingness to applaud the late king for his steadfastness and decency as compared to his eldest son's thorough rottenness, it does not seem to occur to Halperin that Edward VIII's character might be in part due to his parents' legendarily neglectful cold and neglectful care. Halperin's extremely heavyhanded evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's novels are also a bit puzzling, although Bowen's exceptionally eventful life and character make up for his judgmentalism towards her fiction.