George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I »

Miranda Carter is the author of Anthony Blunt: His Lives, which won the Orwell Prize for political writing and the Royal Society of Literature W. H. Heinemann Award, and was chosen as one of The New York Times Book Review’s seven Best Books of 2002. She lives in London with her husband and two sons.

A story of the self-delusion of royalty: three monarchs who were also three first cousins--Wilhelm II, the last kaiser of Germany; George V of Britain; and Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia--and their mistaken belief, on the very brink of World War I, that their family connection could save Europe from itself.

In the years before the war, Wilhelm, George, and Nicholas corresponded and wrote about each other in their diaries. The Three Emperors uses these sources--a hidden history of how Europe went from an age of empire to a more democratic and more brutal one--to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world.

From the kaiser's tantrums to the tsar's indecisions to King George's stamp collection, Carter makes clear how anachronistic the three emperors were: marooned by history in positions out of kilter with their time and ill-equipped by education and personality to deal with the modern world. She delineates the responsibility they...

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Ms. Carter…relates history on a large canvas here, and it's a story she mostly tells with vigor and parched wit…George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is an impressive book. Ms. Carter has clearly not bitten off more than she can chew for she—as John Updike once wrote about Gunter Grass—"chews it enthusiastically before our eyes."