A story of the self-delusion of royalty: three monarchs who were also three first cousins--Wilhelm II, the last kaiser of Germany; George V of Britain; and Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia--and their mistaken belief, on the very brink of World War I, that their family connection could save Europe from itself.In the years before the war, Wilhelm, George, and Nicholas corresponded and wrote about each other in their diaries. The Three Emperors uses these sources--a hidden history of how Europe went from an age of empire to a more democratic and more brutal one--to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world.From the kaiser's tantrums to the tsar's indecisions to King George's stamp collection, Carter makes clear how anachronistic the three emperors were: marooned by history in positions out of kilter with their time and ill-equipped by education and personality to deal with the modern world. She delineates the responsibility they...