The King's Speech

Queen Elizabeth’s dad is portrayed in film again this year in ‘Hyde Park on the Hudson,” starring Bill Murray

I got the book The King’s Speech for Christmas and just finished it; in the very wide field of “slender material adapted into a thrilling hit movie, on whose strength it is then flogged”, it must be some kind of record-breaker. I enjoyed the book, as a reader with about a degree-and-a-half in European history and a keen interest in the pre-war period, but I do not have the creative imagination to have imagined it as fodder for Hollywood. The plain fact is that Lionel Logue scored his big breakthrough in treating the Duke of York (the future King George VI) very quickly, taking a matter of literally a few weeks in late 1926 to help him overcome his stammer and to raise his oratorical abilities to a standard of adequacy. After that time, Logue was consulted very occasionally, serving the King as a sort of good-luck totem on major occasions like the Coronation.

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