The Duke: A Portrait of Prince
Philip
Hardcover - 352 pages (6 June, 1991)
Hodder & Stoughton General; ISBN: 0340546077
|
|
THE DUKE is the biography of Prince Philip, Duke
of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, a
celebrity in his own right and yet an enigma still,
even after forty years in the public eye.
What is he really like? Bombastic, autocratic, say his
critics. Colourful, stimulating, say his admirers.
Here, as Prince Philip turns seventy, Tim Heald has
been given a unique opportunity to find out for
himself. Not for twenty years has a biographer had
such access to talk to Prince Philip and watch him at
work - still very much a man in a hurry, still
speaking and questioning on an astonishing variety
of subjects and treading the almost impossible tight-
rope between the breezy informality which he first
introduced to the royal family and the parade-
ground traditions which he has had to accept.
And members of the royal family - among them the
Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, Princess Anne
and his only surviving sister, Princess Sophie - have
also shared with Heald their thoughts on the man
who started life as Philip of Greece, one of a royal
family who were deposed and exiled while he was
still an infant.
Many other witnesses talk for the first time about
the Prince Philip they know. His early days in exile,
at schools in France, in England and in Germany -
where he had first-hand experience of the
'unpleasant habits' of the Nazis, and then in
Scotland at the newly founded Gordonstoun. His
service with distinction in the Royal Navy during
World War Two. His engagement in 1947 to
Princess Elizabeth, twenty-one-year-old elder
daughter of King George VI.
As Tim Heald observes, Prince Philip swiftly
emerged as very much his own man, winning over
one or two doubters within the Court who might
have preferred a home-grown aristocrat as husband
to the future Queen.
What of his life since then? Here is the best-
informed portrait yet of a life that has been both
independent of, but fully supportive to the Queen.
THE DUKE, written with the co-operation of
Buckingham Palace, includes many hitherto
unfamiliar photographs from royal family albums.
see also: Heald on
Royalty
|
