George IV was a long time coming into his inheritance. His youth was spent - or mis-spent according to his detractors - as Prince of Wales, the handsome Florizel seducing lovely women; his middle age was passed as Prince Regent, necessitated by his father's unhappy mental state, when "Prinny" was notorious for his extravagancies, his quarrels with his wife and his eccentricities. At last, in 1820, he ascended the throne, as a somewhat corpulent fifty-eight-year-old, amid murmurs of revolution and prophecies of disaster. Yet, as Alan Palmer shows, George proved an able monarch, acting with diplomacy and political acumen. But above all, George IV was a man of culture and wit, providing an invaluable bequest to the nation as a patron of the the King's Library in the British Museum, his great collection of paintings, and his Royal Pavilion at Brighton, an exquisite tribute to the Regency era.