Wellington, by Jane Wellesley
There can never be too many biographies of the Duke of Wellington because, like Churchill’s and Nelson’s, his career path is so extraordinary, uplifting, chequered and involving that it reads more like (slightly overwrought) fiction than fact.
The first thing you’d give your mildly implausible hero if you were a novelist or Hollywood screenwriter would be a miserable childhood, a sensitive nature and a sense of burning grievance. That way, the audience would like him, identify with him, and feel all the more happy when he triumphed over adversity.
So it was with young Arthur Wellesley. His cold-hearted mother, Anne, dismissed him with a ‘he’s food for powder and nothing else’; he was given to tears and playing sweetly on the violin; and when he sought the hand of pretty Kitty Pakenham, he was repeatedly rebuffed by her smarter family, who saw little advantage in an alliance with a penniless cavalryman with no obvious prospects.
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