Books: Only a Naval Officer

KING GEORGE VI (891 pp.)— John W. Wheeler-Bennett—St. Martin's ($10).

"Poor Bertie," his mother noted in her diary when David proved difficult over "that woman."

Bertie himself, his diary recorded, "broke down & sobbed like a child." The time was 1936, and King Edward VIII (David to his family) was about to abdicate in order to marry Mrs. Simpson. Until that time Bertie, Duke of York, had been happy to play second fiddle to a one-man band. His biographer, Oxford Don John Wheeler-Bennett, records his "agony of apprehension" lest he should become King. When the...

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