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Start giftingRoyal Highness
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreFor his Royal Highness Klaus Heinrich, prince of a small German duchy, life means servitude to traditional ducal functions—until he meets the independent-spirited and liberal-minded American Miss Spoelmann. During the course of his unorthodox and quixotically tender wooing, Heinrich is forced to reach into unknown depths of his personality and discover the real meaning of the word "duty."
Peopled with a range of characters from aristocrat to artisan, Royal Highness provides a microcosmic view of Europe before the Great War. Mann's charming fable of a decaying, stratified society rejuvenated by modern forces illustrates what he regarded as a universal truth: that ripeness and death are necessary conditions for rebirth.
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1924 The Magic Mountain was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus. Thomas Mann died in 1955.
Simon Vance is a critically acclaimed narrator who has recorded over eight hundred audiobooks and has received over fifty Earphones Awards. A twelve-time Audie Award winner and frequent finalist, he has been named an AudioFile Golden Voice, an AudioFile Best Voice, and the first Booklist Voice of Choice. A former BBC Radio presenter and newsreader in London, he currently lives in California, where he also pursues stage and television acting.
Reviews
“Robert Whitfield strikes the right tongue-in-cheek approach from the first line and sustains it with witty impersonations of the characters.”
“The great virtue of Royal Highness is its relaxed, fairy- tale quality that naturally brings the reader inside that 'Edwardian' calm which preceded everything common to contemporary social life. It is very easy to make connections between the book and theories of stratification, statemaking, ritual, legitimacy, even the political economy of preindustrialized states.”
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