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Hugo Vickers

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Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece Kindle Edition

by Hugo Vickers (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 726 ratings

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Hugo Vickers's Alice is the remarkable story of Princess Andrew of Greece, whose life seemed intertwined with every event of historical importance in twentieth century Europe.

"In 1953, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Alice was dressed from head to foot in a long gray dress and a gray cloak, and a nun's veil. Amidst all the jewels, and velvet and coronets, and the fine uniforms, she exuded an unworldly simplicity. Seated with the royal family, she was a part of them, yet somehow distanced from them. Inasmuch as she is remembered at all today, it is as this shadowy figure in gray nun's clothes..."

Princess Alice, mother of Prince Phillip, was something of a mystery figure even within her own family. She was born deaf, at Windsor Castle, in the presence of her grandmother, Queen Victoria, and brought up in England, Darmstadt, and Malta.

In 1903 she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, and from then on her life was overshadowed by wars, revolutions, and enforced periods of exile. By the time she was thirty-five, virtually every point of stability was overthrown. Though the British royal family remained in the ascendant, her German family ceased to be ruling princes, her two aunts who had married Russian royalty had come to savage ends, and soon afterwards Alice's own husband was nearly executed as a political scapegoat.

The middle years of her life, which should have followed a conventional and fulfilling path, did the opposite. She suffered from a serious religious crisis and at the age of forty-five was removed from her family and placed in a sanitarium in Switzerland, where she was pronounced a paranoid schizophrenic. As her stay in the clinic became prolonged, there was a time where it seemed she might never walk free again. How she achieved her recovery is just one of the remarkable aspects of her story.

Print length

497 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

St. Martin's Press
Publication date

9 July 2013
File size

1548 KB
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Review

"By crafting the perfect blend of juicy gossip and historical details, Vickers makes it abundantly clear why Alice deserves to be known as more than just the queen's mother-in-law."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Hugo Vickers is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and an acknowledged expert on the British Royal Family. He has written biographies of the Queen Mother, Cecil Beaton, Vivien Leigh, Princess Andrew of Greece and the Duchess of Windsor. His book The Kiss won the 1996 Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. His recent bestsellers have included The Quest For Queen Mary and The Sphinx - the life of Gladys, the Duchess of Marlborough.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00DK40ETK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press; First edition (9 July 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1548 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 497 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 865,298 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 254 in Historical Greece Biographies
- 973 in Biographies & Memoirs of Royalty
- 1,158 in History of Greece (Books)

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4.4 726 ratings

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denise

Amazing read Worth Buying

Reviewed in Australia on 11 April 2021

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Author has really done bringing this story to life so informative extremely interesting she was really misunderstood due to ignorance of people surrounding her sadly as I write this review her Son Prince Philip has passed away

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Wendy C. Winslow

Great book about a little known princess.

Reviewed in Canada on 25 February 2021

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This story should be made into a movie !

roby

Ok

Reviewed in Italy on 16 June 2016

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Il libro era in buone condizioni, e, arrivato in anticipo rispetto alle previsioni e per chi e, interessato alle biografie e, un buon libro inesistdnte nella versione italiana

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Karl Port

Alice Princess Andrew of Greece

Reviewed in Germany on 15 August 2015

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Der Lebenslauf der Alice v. Battenberg ist sehr gründlich recherchiert und berichtigt öffentlich bekanntgemachte Bewertungen in sauberer sachlicher Darstellung, die vertiefte Einblicke in die Hintergründe von zeitgenössischem Handeln ermöglichen.

2 people found this helpful

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Tracesprite

A resilient and interestingly eccentric woman

Reviewed in the United States on 10 October 2013

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“Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece” brought home to me how widespread and tenacious the various European royal families are. There are so many of them – princesses, princes, kings, queens, and other people of supposedly noble birth. They have descended from the dictators of Europe and it is a marvelous achievement of modern democracy that they are no long able to wield their tyrannical powers but have to smile and smile and smile to keep us convinced to keep them on the pay roll.

However it is still puzzling as to why we do so. They have various survival tricks, some of which are displayed in this book. One is that they will adapt and change. All the royal families are very interrelated but during the World Wars, it became clear to the British royal family that their German surname was a public relations problem so they simply renamed themselves “Windsor”. Problem solved! There was another issue in that some of Europe’s royalty included SS soldiers in Germany and others were fighting for Britain but they seemed to be able to live this down after the war.

Another survival mechanism is that they somehow manage to convince us that they are entitled to their wealth and privilege. The combination of ritual and glamour seems to intoxicate the crowds. The royals apparently have an extraordinary existence that is different from our everyday hum drum lives and people seem willing to observe this largely without envy or resentment. Occasionally a “commoner” breaks into their exclusive world and this creates particular interest – an interest which became an obsession in the case of Princess Diana.

And on a slightly more worrying note, there is the fact that they are captives. Few of them dare to escape the world that they are familiar with. They belong to us and, at any time, we can lift the roofs off the dolls’ houses in which they live and peer at them, discussing their lives and exclaiming at their stress over their lack of privacy. It could be argued that their lives resemble those of wealthy slaves in that we don’t recognize their basic human rights to freedom of religion and freedom as to where they live or what career they will choose etc. Johann Hari has written about this very convincingly in his book, “God save the Queen?”

This book shows an aspect of this situation. The Greeks were very ambivalent about their royalty and eventually kicked out Princess Alice and her husband, Prince Andrew (Andrea), after first chewing over the idea of killing him.

Both Alice and Andrew were extremely traumatized by this, a clear demonstration of how much loss of identity there may be for royals who lose that role in life. Their marriage moved into difficulties as evidenced by the fact that Alice fell very in love with someone else. They largely abandoned their son, Philip, who was cared for by various English relatives. Andrea drifted aimlessly through the rest of his life without doing being able to find a new direction.

Alice showed her stress by having a breakdown. The delusions that she instinctively chose showed what was lacking in her life. She saw herself as the only woman that Jesus really loved – thus replacing her former marital happiness and also giving herself a strong sense of identity to replace the one smashed by her loss of role within Greece.

It shows her remarkable inner strength and also the loyalty of her mother and other family members that she eventually recovered most of her mental health. She then found a new sense of identity by committing herself to help those who were suffering dreadful poverty as a result of World War II. Her son married Princess Elizabeth, soon to become the Queen of Britain, and Alice was able to find a place within that new arrangement but still maintain her independence of it though her new found work.

6 people found this helpful

brengaf

a woman before her time

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 August 2014

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Hugo Vickers did a fantastic job of writing this book.
it is very complicated to read as there is so much going on and he had to work from so many different sources, letters and medical reports as most of Alices papers were destroyed.
her life spanned so much of early 20th century history.
granddaughter of Queen Victoria so connected to most of the European families.married into the Greek royal family.
born deaf could lip read in several languages.
had a major breakdown in mid life was sectioned for many years.
she said she was the true wife of Christ.
she set up hospitals in the 1st war and worked tirelessly with the wounded soldiers.
stayed in Greece to help the poor and shelter Jews in the 2nd, while Greece was under German occupation.
was in a difficult situation as her daughters were married to SS men
and her son was in the Royal navy. because of her illness missed most of Philips growing up.
her 3rd daughter and family were killed in a plane crash.
her relations the Romanov's were all killed.
she was definitely Bi Polar, but had a fantastic mind she suggested to her brother Dickie Mountbatton that there should be a united Europe (like we have now) well before the 2 war. no one would listen to her.
she finally set up her own religious sect and continued to do good.
a lady to be admired as well as pitied.

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