Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, Volume 1 (of 4)

Horace Walpole had a front-row seat to the birth of the modern British state. Son of the nation's first Prime Minister, friend to princes and wits, he wrote these memoirs decades after watching a young George III seize the throne in 1760 and begin dismantling his grandfather's empire. This first volume covers the opening act: the political chess match between the king, his Scottish favorite Lord Bute, and the aging titan William Pitt. Walpole records it all with an insider's waspishness and a historian's prescience. He dissects the queen mother's iron grip on her son, the follies of the court, the first stirrings of the American crisis. Here is 18th-century power laid bare by a man who understood its mechanisms because he lived inside them.