A page-turning work of well-researched history: The Mountbattens reviewed

He would want to be remembered as the debonair war hero who delivered Indian independence and became the royal family’s elder statesman. But something went wrong for Lord Louis Mountbatten. Andrew Roberts anticipated many modern historians when he called him ‘a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler’. Field Marshal Gerald Templer told him to his face he was so crooked that if he swallowed a nail, he’d shit a corkscrew.

As reputations go, the turnaround has been extraordinary. Since many approaches to ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten’s life have been tried, and the personal archival material is carefully curated, Andrew Lownie has sought to throw new light through a joint biography of him and his much wealthier wife, Edwina Ashley, heiress to the fortunes of her maternal grandfather, the financier Sir Ernest Cassel, and to Broadlands, now the Mountbatten family seat. It is 40 years since Mountbatten’s horrific assassination in Ireland — the period he himself suggested, with typical conceit, would be required to assess his place in history.