The author does bring out well the evo-lution of Victorian Britain towards a republic with a constitutional, hereditary monarch, and of the US towards an elective monarchy. The British monarchs after George III reigned, while the stronger US Presidents have ruled.

More could have been made of what the British royal family thought of Woodrow Wilson, the Roosevelts, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan, and vice versa. It is recorded that the anti-US George V "didn't think much" of Wilson after he refused to send American forces to the Russian Civil War against the Bolsheviks (though the king had contributed to the massacre of the Romanovs by denying them asylum in Britain). Relations between the desiccated intellectual president and the philistine king were bound to be difficult in any case.

Edward VII liked Teddy Roosevelt and George VI was somewhat overawed by FDR, but he and the Queen Mother made a good impression. George VI and Queen Elizabeth were invited to the US in 1939 by Franklin Roosevelt because he wanted to warn Hitler that he would not be neutral, as Wilson had been, in the event of war; he also wanted to encourage the British monarch, as he had found his prime ministerial counterparts, MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain, to be hopeless in terms of containing Hitler. FDR told his inner circle that in the likely event of war, he hoped the gracious royal couple would help him disarm isolationist opinion in the US.

They personified the long-lost (in America) mystique of the British Crown. The author quotes, to great effect, Eleanor Roosevelt on how moving it was when she and FDR saw them off at the little railway station at Hyde Park, New York, and the crowds along the banks of the Hudson sang Auld Lang Syne, six weeks before the outbreak of the war.

In 1957, the present Queen thought Eisen-hower lacked self-assurance. The royals noted the glamour of the Kennedys and the intel-ligence of Richard Nixon, but we are told nothing of what these men thought of the Queen and her family. The Suez crisis, which severely strained US-UK relations for a time, is not mentioned at all.

The author has various (generally agree-able) foibles, such as his frequent references to British royalty as "poetry", without elab-oration, and his inexplicable interest in the fulminations of the Chicago Tribune, a neur-otically Anglophobic daily that for decades referred to the "Brutish Empire," pandering to its German and Irish-American readers.

With all that said, this remains a very readable and well-documented thesis which one does not have to agree with entirely, to appreciate and read with interest and pleasure.