I picked this up based off reading the introduction for the sequel and seeing how much Larman dislikes Edward VIII (whom I will be referring to as David — Larman makes the choice to use Edward in his book, which is fair enough, but his whole family called him David and I prefer to link the name Edward to my much preferred favorite, Edward VII). I figured I should start with the first volume and see what led him to such vituperative language in the second one. I am firmly in the anti-David camp, as evidenced by my previous reviews, but I am always open to learning any new facts that might complicate or humanize my view of him, as I do try to generally be a mentally flexible person and not set in my ways to the detriment of accepting the truth. This book further confirmed my ideas of David, as does every book I read, but maybe someday I’ll read about something nice he did besides be charming and visit the destitute in Wales that one time.
The Crown in Crisis covers the abdication crisis in 1936, focusing firmly on that year and the people involved in its dramatic events. Larman keeps things moving pretty well and is a very solid writer. He does let his own opinions come through a lot, but I don’t mind that since it was clear what was historical fact and what was his own thinking. He clearly did a lot of research for this and used a good end note system that I appreciated. Everything was nicely cited and any time someone does this much work in the archives I feel that I can trust them. I did know a lot of this material from my previous reading, but I hadn’t read a book specifically on the abdication before, so this felt like a good foundational text in terms of laying everything out in a timeline. The events were pretty complicated with the amount of people involved, and one of my only qualms with this book is that sometimes people would appear who had clearly been mentioned before, but I had lost track of who they were. Larman is a good writer, but because of how many British men there are in this book and how much material he has to get through, I think he sometimes can’t flesh out everyone involved and the reader is left a bit confused. I also thought based off the prologue that Ribbentrop would be more involved here, but he didn’t really show up at all after that.
Overall, I thought this was very solid and readable, and I appreciated the amount of work that clearly went into it. I think I’ll probably pick up the second one, as the post-abdication years interest me a lot more. I did feel that chunks of this were slow for me to get through, but I am not a political history fan so I think that was more on me.