Britain's King George V reigned during the most eventful decades of the early 20th century but was often ridiculed by posterity as a "dull and limited" man--a vision historian Jane Ridley (The Heir Apparent) corrects in her exhaustively researched biography George V: Never a Dull Moment.
Piercing the myth of "King George the Dull," Ridley successfully gets under the sovereign's "humdrum exterior" to reveal a simple man who nevertheless successfully navigated the British monarchy through the turbulence of World War I, the Russian Revolution and rise of Bolshevism, the collapse of dynastic Europe, Irish Home Rule and political crises too numerous to count. Indeed, his 25-year reign (1910-1936) "never had a dull moment." Ridley's engaging study also spotlights Queen Mary and the marriage that helped George V so much. Mary provided the calm and secure domestic life George V ached for, which stood in stark contrast to the lifestyle of his philandering and unserious father, King Edward VII ("I'm not interested in any wife except my own," George once declared). A lifelong conservative, George V was always "fighting a one-man war against the twentieth century," at the same time laying the foundations of the modern British monarchy (his adoption of the House of Windsor as the official name of the British Royal Family in 1917 still holds 100 years later).
Ridley's brilliant biography is a benchmark for future historians, revealing a man of deep character who ultimately saved a sclerotic monarchy. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver