Word: mountbatten
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Edward, Prince of Wales, later briefly King Edward VIII of England and interminably the Duke of Windsor, who was best man at his wedding. As a young man, Prince Philip, penniless but promising, married his adored young cousin Lilibet. His sister was the Queen of Sweden. Louis Mountbatten himself--and how he loved it all--was wealthy, flashingly handsome, a polo-playing friend of rajas and movie stars, a somewhat too fearless naval commander, an unsubtle, decent, enormously energetic man, grand if not great, whose immense, childish vanity was only just outweighed by his good sense and charm...
...Albert Victor Nicholas). He was the last Viceroy of India, who in 1947 presided over the fade-out of the British raj. He went out of this world at 79 (blown up in 1979 by I.R.A. terrorists while boating in Donegal Bay) as Admiral of the Fleet, the Earl Mountbatten of Burma...
Granted that it would be hard to write a dull account of such a personage, Philip Ziegler, author of biographies of Lord Melbourne and Diana Cooper, offers a remarkably lively and human portrait. His research was authorized by the Mountbatten family, but in this case, he says, the term does not mean that the book was distorted to fit the demands of the survivors. Ziegler's tone is generally admiring but not adulatory, as when he compares Mountbatten with Douglas MacArthur, his fellow Supreme Commander in the Pacific during World War II. The two Supremos were equally and supremely vain...
...Victoria of Hesse, granddaughter of the English Queen. Prince Louis, who had switched nationality at 14 to join the English navy, never lost his slight German accent, and in 1914, despite an illustrious naval career, was hounded from his post as First Sea Lord by anti-German public frenzy. Mountbatten, his second son (the family name was anglicized in 1917 at the direction of King George V), never forgot the injustice, and counted his own posting as First Sea Lord in 1954 as a vindication of his father...
...considered lacking in intellectual brilliance, but he was quick- minded and receptive to other people's ideas. The result, with a little help from his social connections, was an unending series of promotions. There was never a way to treat Dickie Mountbatten as if he were just another lieutenant. He had money of his own, and he had married the beautiful and exceedingly wealthy Edwina Ashley. It was a stormy union, marked by his many affairs and her infatuations, including one with Jawaharlal Nehru, but it lasted until Edwina's death in 1960. Stationed in Malta in the late...