ALICE

A well-crafted life of the late mother-in-law of the present queen of England.

Readers of an antimonarchical bent already know that the European nobility was and is a strange breed apart, carefully selected for recessive genes and bizarre behavior. As royal-family and celebrity biographer Vickers (Loving Garbo, 1994, etc.) shows, Alice, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, came from one of the stranger clans, populated by proud members of the SS, globe-hopping adventurers, and figures such as a “morganatic” step-grandmother who spent her final days “playing patience in the Hôtel des Trois Couronnes in Vevey, and cheating to win.” Related by blood and marriage to the English ruling family and the German Battenbergs, whose transplanted members would rename themselves Mountbatten, Alice married into the Greek royal line. She was not often in Greece, for the Greeks prided themselves on being the world’s first democrats and did not esteem their royalty highly—besides, they were inclined to change governments frequently (23 times between 1924 and 1935 alone). When she was resident, Alice did many good things, organizing a modern hospital corps to serve Greek soldiers wounded in the First Balkan War and, under the Nazi occupation, sheltering Jews in her royal residence, for which service she was honored by a place in Jerusalem’s Vad Yashem memorial. (When thanked by one of those whom she sheltered, writes Vickers, she “said sharply that she had only done what she believed to be her duty.”) For all her good deeds, Alice led a tragic life marked by the deaths of family members and her own descent into what psychiatrists deemed to be paranoiac schizophrenia, but also by a religious sensibility that lent her an otherworldly aura in her later years.

Sympathetic yet free of pathos, Vickers’s life celebrates an unusual and fascinating woman.