Mountbatten: The Official Biography

Description for MOUNTBATTEN: THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY by Philip Ziegler:

Few were as charmed as that of Lord Mountbatten. Queen Victoria attended his christening. The future Edward VIII was best man at his wedding to one of the greatest heiresses of Europe, one of the most attractive and spirited women of the new generation. Twenty years later, still only in his early forties, Mountbatten held Supreme Command in the south-east Asian theatre of the greatest war the world has known. At its close he found himself responsible for a huge area where the old European empires crumbled in the face of nationalist, often Communist, movements. Hardly had he time to meet this challenge before he was called upon to preside as the last Viceroy and first Governor-General at the transfer of power in India. Of all the services he was to perform, none was more daunting and none more dazzlingly discharged.

That was not the end of it. Mountbatten reverted to his interrupted naval career and climbed to the pinnacle of his profession, the post of First Sea Lord. He held this position at the time of the Suez affair, and the quality of his advice and of his moral courage at that time are here, for the first time, revealed.

He went on to remodel the defence system of Britain---and to die tragically in on of the foulest of the IRA's many foul acts. But to describe his public life further would be to unbalance an outstanding biography in which his lifelong intimacy with the British royal family is only one of the fascinating themes explored. He knew every politician and Service chief; he cherished the conversation of eminent scientists and technologists; he loved the world of stage and screen and counted Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford among his close friends.

Philip Ziegler has achieved a masterpiece. The riches of the Mountbatten archive at Broadlands, to which he is the first biographer to have had full access, have not deflected him from investigating with thorough scholarship all sources for his subjects's life. Kindly, understanding, admiring yet undeceived, he shows with perfect politeness that the version of history that Mountbatten would have had us believe is not always supported by the evidence. He also reveals, through direct quotations of letters and other documents, what an affectionate, kind-hearted and often vulnerable man was hidden beneath that carapace of medals, protocol and childlike egocentricity.

This biography on the grand scale. For all the seriousness which the author brings to the great issues and events of which he writes, he never forgets that he is painting the portrait of a man who, for all the glitter and the gold, was nothing if not human.