The King's Speech
- Sep 27, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 1
How One Man Saved the British Monarchy
by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi
"One man saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century - he wasn't a prime minister or an archbishop of Canterbury. He was an almost unknown, and self-taught, speech therapist named Lionel Logue, whom one newspaper in the 1930s famously dubbed 'The Quack who saved a King'.
Logue wasn't a British aristocrat or even an Englishman - he was a commoner and an Australian to boot. Nevertheless it was the outgoing, amiable Logue who single-handedly turned the nervous, tongue-tied Duke of York into one of Britain's greatest kings after his brother, Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 over his love of Mrs Simpson.
This is the previously untold story of the remarkable relationship between Logue and the haunted future King George VI, written with Logue's grandson and drawing exclusively from his grandfather Lionel's diaries and archive. It throws an extraordinary light on the intimacy of the two men, and the vital role the King's wife, the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, played in bringing them together to save her husband's reputation and reign."
I listened to this on Audiobook, which I think was a wise choice for me. Overall, I really enjoyed it, and the narrator did a great job.
Do I have a few things to nitpick on? Of course. But they are so insubstantial that they're hardly worth mentioning (though I'm going to anyway): like the fact that each time they mentioned them going by ship, they added the weight of the vessel. Like I'm interested in that particular ship's weight. It seemed to random and irrelevant to the story that it bugged me more than it should have. Or that the author went back in several instances and again told us something we'd already learned in a previous chapter, sometimes several chapters back. Not only referencing, but retelling the whole thing.
Other than that - like I said, the entire book was great, and really interesting. Of course, I knew some of the story from the film, but it was fun to dive deeper into it.
I generally don't read a lot - barely any - non-fiction, but have decided that maybe it's time to begin; and this was a great one to start my non-fiction journey with. I was pleasantly surprised by the narration. As mentioned, the narrator did a great job - but besides that, it was really well written, and except for a lot of details like dates etc, etc, and continuous notes from the authors about sources (which I guess is otherwise a good thing in a biography), it was written almost like a regular story and very easy to follow, not so heavy as the few non-fics I've tried in the past.
Absolutely recommend for a fascinating story and decent read if you're interested at all in the British royal family, politics and history.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
*I don't really have a baseline for grading non-fiction, so I might change this in the future.
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