Alice

The remarkable, moving story of Prince Philip’s mother by eminent biographer Hugo Vickers, updated in this new edition – for fans of Kingmaker and The Lives and Deaths of the Princesses of Hesse

‘Gripping. Hugo Vickers has pulled off an extraordinary feat in describing the life – in many ways tragic – of Princess Andrew of Greece. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is a masterpiece.’ – A. N. Wilson

‘Vickers tells this story with a sure touch and an expertise that only he can command’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘A sympathetic, piquant and well-defined portrait of a spirited woman’ LITERARY REVIEW

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

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Princess Alice, mother of Prince Phillip, was something of a mystery figure even within her own family. Profoundly deaf, she was born at Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-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, enforced periods of exile. Further crisis hit when, at the age of forty-five, she was removed from her family and placed in a sanatorium 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.

Yet she recovered.

Illuminating and enthralling, eminent biographer Hugo Vickers’s account of her life is as tumultuous and extraordinary as the times she lived through.