The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III

"The Elizabeth Longford Prize is an award set up in 20o3 in memory of Elizabeth Longford (1906-2002), a British biographer who wrote biographies of both Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. This year’s prize went to a book about George III: The Last King of America by the British biographer Andrew Roberts. Roberts, who previously wrote an acclaimed biography of Napoleon as well as an excellent one-volume biography of Winston Churchill , tries to restore the reputation of a man who was blamed in England for losing the American colonies and reviled in America for being a tyrant. In Roberts’s telling, George III suffered from bipolar disorder and many of the criticisms of him were just crude distortions by his opponents."