The Queen Mother: The Untold Story of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, Who Became Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother
Written by Lady Colin Campbell
Narrated by Jennifer M. Dixon
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother has been called the "most successful queen since Cleopatra." Her personality was so captivating that even her arch-enemy Wallis Simpson wrote about "her legendary charm." Portrayed as a selfless partner to the King in the Oscar-winning movie The King's Speech, the Queen Mother is most often remembered from her later years as the smiling granny with the pastel hats. When she died in 2002, just short of her 102nd birthday, she was praised for a long life well lived.
But there was another side to her story. For the first time, Lady Colin Campbell shows us that the untold life of the Queen Mother is far more fascinating and moving than the official version that has been peddled ever since she became royal in 1923. With unparalleled sources-including members of the Royal Family, aristocrats, and friends and relatives of Elizabeth herself-this mesmerizing account takes us inside the real and sometimes astonishing world of the royal family.
Lady Colin Campbell
LADY COLIN CAMPBELL, who is connected to the royal family through mutual ancestors and marriage, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Diana in Private--which was the first book to reveal the truth behind the "fairytale" marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales--as well as The Royal Marriages: What Really Goes on in the Private World of the Queen and Her Family, and The Real Diana.
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Reviews for The Queen Mother
19 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5She spends an inordinate amount of time questioning Queen Elizabeth legitimacy. Then she uses a bible situation to justify some of her assumptions but the Bible example she uses is wrong. Poor research and just trying to justify her book.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful unsugarcoated biographyof the Queen Mum. This book is rich with historical background as well as 1st hand insights.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Campbell has penned a prurient, verbose, self-aggrandizing pseudo-biography worthy of the British scandal sheets. To call this tittle-tattle a biography is to shame every journalist of integrity, for journalism this is not.This reader, having been subjected to egregious gossip throughout this interminable book, came away no more enlightened as to any of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon's accomplishments or history. Instead, Campbell has delved into her own personal speculation, snobbery and even racism of the worst sort, putting forth arguments of a medical, political and societal nature on which she is unqualified to write, and plainly is too cavalier to bother to research. Why research when we can have tea with Lady Such-and-So and gossip away the afternoon?It is ridiculous in the extreme to put forth the argument the Queen Mother was a harridan exceeding her ancestor, Lady Macbeth; that Edward VIII would have single-handedly kept together the British Empire; that Wallis Simpson would have made a far better queen by virtue of her fashion elan.What is plain is Campbell's obsession with superficial beauty, starvation-mode thinness, the need to associate within accepted, rarefied circles, and a compulsion to the nasty degradation of anyone Campbell feels unacceptable. In short, Campbell has penned a gossip sheet right out of discussions in her own parlour whisperings.Not once does Campbell make even slight mention of the Queen Mother's extensive charitable work, the extraordinary strides to which she and George V went to bolster British spirit and capability during WWII. Instead we are given to believe the Queen Mother was an old soak who lay abed gorging on chocolates and manipulating every person within her sphere of control, and avoiding any sexual congress whatever with her husband. She even goes so far to assert all of the Queen Mother's children were the result of artificial insemination, so allegedly adverse was the Queen Mother to intercourse. George V is portrayed as a booby. Edward VIII as the mistreated exiled king. Which does not even touch upon the the fictional creations she has made of Charles, Margaret, Phillip and even Elizabeth Regis. Truly, if you want to read a decent biography of the Queen Mother, choose some other author, nay any other author than what this ridiculous dabbler has created in this trumped up bit of tripe.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fun read on the Queen Mother