Kenneth Rose's life of King George V is recognised as one of the great twentieth-century biographies. The grandfather of Elizabeth II embarked on his 25-year reign (1910-1936) in the last confident glow of the Victorian Age. At heart a lover of hearth and home, he sustained the nation throughout the Great War and the political crises of an uneasy peace. It is due to George V's inspired common sense that the House of Windsor survived while other thrones and empires fell like autumn leaves. But then, as his funeral cortege turned into New Palace Yard the Maltese Cross fell from the Crown and landed in the gutter. 'A most terrible omen' wrote Harold Nicolson. And indeed it was. This sensitive portrait of the king is based on unpublished extracts from his diaries and correspondence; the papers of each of his five prime ministers; the confidences of courtiers; and the recollections given to the author by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and other members of the royal family.