Word: bradford
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With its evenhanded blend of public spectacle and intimate detail, Sarah Bradford's new biography, Elizabeth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 564 pages; $30), is rumored to have nettled the Queen when published in Britain recently, but it is really the book she deserves. It's all here, the public occasions and ceremonies, the baffling indirections of court diplomacy, the knots and ravels of an intense family life. Elizabeth II, 70 this month, has reigned 44 long years, years spent largely in public. Her lifetime assignment is to be the embodiment of the monarchy, and at that she is impeccable--serene, stately...
...would run the family. Elizabeth, pursuing endless duty, was often absent for months at a time, and her children were brought up by nannies with strong wills and limited imaginations. Philip, worried about the sensitive Charles, sent him off for toughening to his own spartan alma mater, Gordonstoun. Bradford's pages on Charles' beatings and bullyings are hard to read. Both neglected and spoiled, none of the children could quite absorb their mother's sense of purpose into their own lives...
THAT, OF COURSE, IS AN OVERsimplification. The book offers myriad fascinating examples of the fragility of the royal world. Bradford previously wrote a biography of George VI, and the strongest chapters of this book deal with Elizabeth's first 30 years, where Bradford's sources are strongest. The pages teem with hardy secondary players--the spoiled, resentful Duke of Windsor; the Queen Mother, tough as tacks but effervescently charming; the ambitious, meddling Lord Louis Mountbatten...
Charles' reputation survived the TV show, but the book, Prince of Wales, in which the ditching of Diana and the complaints about his parents are spelled out, was a disaster from which he has not recovered. If Bradford is accurate when she writes that Charles returned to Camilla by 1984--three years after his marriage, before the birth of Prince Harry and presumably before the marriage became, in Charles' words, "irretrievably broken down"--the resurgence in popularity that his supporters predict will follow the divorce may be a long time coming...
...Windsors are pretty much in disarray, even as books about them are becoming more dangerous. The most recent is the Bradford biography of the Queen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), due out in the U.S. in April but excerpted in the London Times in January. Bradford, the author of several respected books, was considered a trusty by the palace, but once again the royals were wrong. Among her previous subjects is Elizabeth's father, the estimable, dull George VI. From that project she probably got some good sources for the new book. Beating Kitty Kelley, who has been working on a book...