Frau Marie von Bunsen knows two worlds. She calls her
book The World I Used to Know (Thornton Butterworth, Its.), but she has known more than one. The daughter of a famous Ambassador to the Court of St. James, she has much English blood in her veins and though her standpoint is German she has a sympathy with, and knowledge of, upper class society in England when it could be spoken of as an exclusive class. The German picture is not quite what we should expect. The Prussian court before the War as She saw It was far simpler and more human than we have been taught to suppose. She, herself, led a freer life than girls of her station in England, travelling, painting, boating, making friends and flirting in complete independence, without ever creating any scandal or apparently any hostile criticism. Perhaps the most intimate friend of the Empress Frederick, who talked to her frequently of her eldest son, she makes a Picture of this able, limited, exacting, disappointed, woman and her surroundings so real and arresting as to make the reader feel that he too has stayed in foreign palaces in all the assured intimacy of a dream, and all the homeliness of a commonplace visit.
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