Philip Ziegler's "King Edward VIII"

The perils of reading authorized biographies

Our book today is Philip Ziegler’s big 1990 biography of England’s King Edward VIII, a heavy 500-page authorized affair with blurbs from Elizabeth Longford and Sarah Bradford and an Acknowledgments section that reads like Burke’s Peerage. Ziegler is a terrifically engaging writer; his book on the Black Death is still the best popular history of the plague, and even his doorstop on Mountbatten is compelling even though it should be boring. His King Edward VIII is every bit as readable as everything else this author wrote, but it’s also a perfect illustration of the intricacies of reading biography.