Umbrella

(Paperback)

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Description

George Gordon, cousin to Byron, heir to a desolate Scottish estate, superficially enjoys a brilliant career- he dines at Malmaison with Napoleon and Josephine, excavates the Acropolis, shares a night in a hayloft with Metternich, inherits the Earldom of Aberdeen, marries two beautiful women, becomes Foreign Secretary twice and then ultimately Prime Minister. Yet Lord Aberdeen remains an awkward, tragic figure, increasingly at odds with his times, shattered by repeated bereavements, loathed, abused and eventually driven out of office by his fellow countrymen for his doomed efforts to prevent the Crimean War.

Reviews

Quite simply the best British historical novel in years * Daily Mail *
A triumph -- Allan Massie * The Scotsman *
Mount is a fresh and brilliant historical writer; he brings a haunted and scorned statesman sympathetically to life and makes the past breathe again * Sunday Times *
Umbrella has a powerful, melancholy and peculiarly English charm... a most affecting story * Sunday Telegraph *

Author Bio

Ferdinand Mount is a reviewer, influential collumnist and political commentator. He has written for the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, and was editor of The Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2003. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Of Love and Asthma (Vintage), the first of the Chronicle of Modern Twilight Series, and has since written Heads You Win, the bestselling memoir Cold Cream and, most recently, The New Few: A Very British Oligarchy. He lives in London.