New Chapter Author Mornings give the opportunity to meet fascinating writers and discuss their work and help raise funds for Parkinson’s UK.

To mark the 40^th anniversary of Lord Mountbatten’s assassination by the IRA comes a nuanced portrayal of two remarkable people and their complex marriage in a new book, The Mountbattens – Their Lives and Loves. Drawing on four years of research around the world, prize-winning and bestselling historian Andrew Lownie provides a fresh and revealing portrait of the glamorous couple behind the modern royal family.

Andrew Lownie says: “Though both Dickie and Edwina have had individual official biographies many years ago, this is the first joint biography and is based on extensive research not just in their own private papers but also archive collections around the world, interviews with dozens of people who knew them closely and Freedom of Information requests on both sides of the Atlantic. What I found surprised me and gives a very different picture of the couple and their relationship than in previous books.”

This is an account of an unusual marriage which, whilst beset with infidelities, was also a loving and mutually supportive one. It also reveals much new information on many of the controversies of Mountbatten’s career from the disastrous 1942 Dieppe Raid to the rapid transfer of power in India in 1947 as well as his murder in 1979.

Andrew Lownie was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was Dunster History Prizeman and President of the Union, before taking his Masters and doctorate at Edinburgh University. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and former visiting fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, he has run his own literary agency since 1988. A trustee of the Campaign for Freedom of Information and President of The Biographers Club, he has written for the Times, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, Spectator and Guardian and formerly served in the Royal Naval Reserve. His previous books include acclaimed lives of the writer John Buchan and the spy Guy Burgess.

11am: Coffee
11.30am: Talk

In aid of Parkinson’s UK.