Sergeant Shakespeare

New York: The Viking Press, 1950. Presumed first American Edition/first printing. Hardcover. Good in good dust jacket. Name of previous owner inside front cover. Cover has some wear and soiling.. 96 p. Occasional footnotes. From Wikipedia: "Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich GCMG, DSO, PC (22 February 1890 1 January 1954), known as Duff Cooper, was a British Conservative Party politician, diplomat and author. He wrote six books, including an autobiography, Old Men Forget, and a biography of Talleyrand, the 18th and 19th century French diplomat. He wrote one novel, Operation Heartbreak (1950)....The only son of fashionable society doctor Sir Alfred Cooper and Lady Agnes Duff, daughter of James Duff, 5th Earl Fife, Duff Cooper was the youngest of their four children. He had royal connections: his maternal uncle, the first Duke of Fife, was married to Louise, Princess Royal, the daughter of King Edward VII, while his mother's maternal grandmother was Elizabeth Hay, Countess of Erroll, an illegitimate daughter of King William IV and his mistress Dorothy Jordan. Cooper enjoyed a typical gentleman's upbringing of country estates, London society, Wixenford School, Eton College and New College, Oxford. At Oxford, his Eton friendship with The Honourable John Nevile Manners, won him entry into a famous circle of young aristocrats and intellectuals known as the Coterie, including Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Raymond Asquith (son of the Prime Minister), Sir Denis Anson, Edward Horner and the celebrated Lady Diana Manners. He cultivated a reputation for eloquence and fast living and although he had established a reputation as a poet, he earned an even stronger reputation for gambling, womanizing, and drinking in his studied emulation of the life of the 18th and 19th Whig statesman Charles James Fox. Following Oxford, he entered the Foreign Service and, owing to the national importance of his work at the cipher desk, he was excluded from military service until 1917, when he joined the Grenadier Guards. He served with distinction as a lieutenant in the campaigns of 1918, winning a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for conspicuous gallantry. Almost all of his closest friends, including Shaw-Stewart, Horner, Asquith and John Manners were killed in the war, drawing him closer to Lady Diana Manners, whom he married in 1919. An extremely popular social figure hailed for her beauty and eccentricities, she was one of several daughters born to the Duke and Duchess of Rutland; her biological father, however, was believed to be the English politician Harry Cust, known as one of the most handsome men of his day. The Coopers' marriage was fraught with infidelities, notably Duff's affairs with the Franco-American Singer sewing-machine heiress Daisy Fellowes, the socialite Gloria Guinness, the French novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin and the writer Susan Mary Alsop (then an American diplomat's wife, by whom he had an illegitimate son, William Patten Jr. ), The polo player 'Boy' Capel's wife Diana, and the Anglo-Irish socialite and fashion model Maxime de La Falaise were two more, although Lady Diana reportedly did not mind, explaining to their son that "They were the flowers, but I was the tree." Returning to the Foreign Service, he became principal private secretary to two ministers and played a significant role in the Egyptian and Turkish crises in the early 1920s, before winning a seat in Parliament as a Conservative for Oldham in 1924. He gave one of the most acclaimed maiden speeches of the century and became known as a stalwart supporter of Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, and a friend of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill. Cooper became Financial Secretary to the War Office in January, 1928, before losing his seat in the 1929 election when the Conservative Party lost power. Turning to literature, he produced Talleyrand (1932), a short biography that was published by his nephew Rupert Hart-Davis to critical praise and lasting success. The 1931 by-election for the constituency of Westminster St. George's saw the Empire Free Trade Crusade party threatening the Conservative position at a time when satisfaction with Baldwin's leadership was at a low.