The Importance of Being Edward

Biographer of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Stanley Wientraub employs previously little-used or unknown diaries, letters, memoirs and reportage from both sides of the Atlantic to throw fresh light on Edward VII's half-century of waiting to become King. The book provides a picture of the Prince and his worlds: his difficult and frustrating childhood, his introductions to gentlemanly sins at Oxford and Cambridge, and his chilly arranged marriage to the pretty but dull Princess Alexandra, from whom he frenetically escaped in a succession of balls, races, spas, gambling, carousing and whoring.