George, Nicholas and Wilhelm : three royal cousins and the road to World War I / Miranda Carter.
Carter, Miranda, 1965-; Carter, Miranda, 1965- Three emperors.
2010
D517 .C34 2010 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection

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Title George, Nicholas and Wilhelm : three royal cousins and the road to World War I / Miranda Carter.
Author Carter, Miranda, 1965-
Edition 1st American ed.
ISBN 9781400043637 (hardcover)
1400043638 (hardcover)
Imprint New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Language English
Description xxv, 498 pages, [32] pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Call Number D517 .C34 2010
Dewey Decimal Classification 940.3/112
Summary In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world. Miranda Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. This book is a brilliant and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of these men: damaged, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, stubborn Nicholas; and anxious, dutiful George, and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria, grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third, whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy arch-vulgarian who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War I, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect. For all three men the war would be a disaster that destroyed forever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.
Note Originally published as: "The three emperors : three cousins, three empires and the road to World War One." London : Fig Tree, 2009.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references (pages 469-478) and index.
Added Author Carter, Miranda, 1965- Three emperors.
Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
All Resources
Three childhoods, three countries
Wilhelm: an experiment in perfection, 1859
George: coming second, 1865
Nicholas: a diamond-studded ivory tower, 1868
Family ties, imperial contests
Wilhelm emperor 1888-90
Young men in love 1891-94
Wilhelm anglophile 1891-95
Perfidious Muscovy 1895-97
Behind the wall 1893-1904
Imperial imperatives 1898-1901
A bright new century
The fourth emperor 1901-4
Unintended consequences 1904-5
Continental shifts 1906-8
A Balkan crisis 1908-9
Edward's mantle 1910-11
Celebrations and warnings 1911-14
July 1914
Armageddon
A war 1914-18.

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