Eminent Georgians: The Lives of King George V, Elizabeth Bowen, St. John Philby, and Nancy Astor

This certainly isn't Lytton Strachey. Like Strachey and Richard Holmes, however, Halperin well realizes the inherent great enjoyability of very short biographies of extremely interesting people. There seems to be almost no original research here, and Halperin is willing to make an extremely shallow and lazy transition to an anecdote just to squeeze it in, but he does write with grace (and has an eye for a great story). Oddly, there's a running theme throughout the book: the perfidy of what Halperin extremely loosely calls "treason," although what he means by treason seems so broad at times as to be almost meaningless. The best lives here are of the stodgy George V and the hilariously irreverent Nancy Astor, because with both Halperin seems really to have a new angle he wants to bring out; while his willingness to applaud the late king for his steadfastness and decency as compared to his eldest son's thorough rottenness, it does not seem to occur to Halperin that Edward VIII's character might be in part due to his parents' legendarily neglectful cold and neglectful care. Halperin's extremely heavyhanded evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's novels are also a bit puzzling, although Bowen's exceptionally eventful life and character make up for his judgmentalism towards her fiction.