This book constitutes the sequel to Mountbatten: Apprentice War Lord, published by Adrian Smith in 2022, which covered Lord Louis Mountbatten's early career as a naval captain and then Britain's chief of combined operations, 1941–1943. Biographers have been fascinated by Mountbatten's royal pedigree—Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were among his godparents in 1900, and his great nephew, then Charles, Prince of Wales, called Mountbatten “the grandfather I never had”—and have dissected his character flaws, including ambition, arrogance, and constant manipulation of the historical record. “For Mountbatten the process of myth-making was a lifelong project” (p. 186). A considerable amount has also been written about his violent demise in August 1979, when his boat was blown up by terrorists from the Provisional Irish Republican Army off the northwest coast of Ireland.
Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, Smith spends a good deal of time wending his way through the...