Buckingham Babylon : the rise and fall of the House of Windsor
(Book)

Ninety years of dirt on the British royal family. Fearon (a British freelance journalist) gives us a blow-by- blow account of the royal scandals from the end of Queen Victoria's reign up to Prince Charles and Princess ``Squidgy'' Diana. En route, we're regaled with the amours of Edward VII; the death of George V by an injection of morphine and cocaine so that the news might be announced by the London Times ``rather than the less appropriate evening journals''; how Edward VII was maneuvered into abdicating not because of his resolve to marry Wallis Simpson but because of his Nazi sympathies, and much more. Fearon wastes no words as he passes from one scandal to the next. His achievement is that we now have them all in a single book--though there's little here that an informed reader would not know already. In tabloid fashion, the author exudes moral indignation, yet not consistently: He mocks George V's failure to rescue his cousin the Czar, popularly seen to be a cruel autocrat, and then condemns George VI's attempt to cover up the involvement of his German relatives with the Nazis. Fearon is at home with a vast network of political and royal personages and has a gift for evoking historical occasions--but he provides no footnotes and cites few authorities, so it's difficult to check his accuracy. Confidence isn't inspired when he confuses Charles II with the deposed James II, especially since the context is the choice of the name ``Charles'' for the present Prince of Wales. Fearon treats his characters more as objects of detraction than real people, and he fails to grasp that the royal cover-ups have been motivated, at least in part, by a particularly English sense of noblesse oblige. At once morally repugnant and compelling reading.