The King's Speech

By: Mark Logue, Peter Conradi

Narrated by: Jamie Glover

Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

Winner of the Best Picture Oscar 2011 Award

One man saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century – amazingly, he was an almost unknown, and certainly unqualified, speech therapist called Lionel Logue, whom one newspaper in the 1930s famously dubbed ‘The Quack who saved a King’.

Logue wasn’t a British aristocrat or even an Englishman – he was a commoner and an Australian to boot. Nevertheless it was the outgoing, amiable Logue who single-handedly turned the famously nervous, tongue-tied, Duke of York into the man who was capable of becoming King. The King’s Speech is the previously untold story of the extraordinary relationship between Logue and the haunted young man who became King George VI, drawn from Logue’s unpublished personal diaries. They throw extraordinary light on the intimacy of the two men – and the vital role the King’s wife, the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, played in bringing them together to save her husband’s reputation and his career as King.

©2010 Quercus Publishing PLC (P)2010 Quercus Publishing PLC

Critic reviews

“The King's Speech is the compelling story of how speech therapist Lionel Logue helped the man who didn't want to be king cope with his stutter and make inspirational speeches to a nation at war, is utterly compelling, drawn from history and, more importantly, from Logue's own archives and diaries. Jamie Glover's reading, using a remarkable and unforced range of accents, is perfectly pitched.” ( Kati Nicholl, Daily Express)