The Last Kaiser: William The Impetuous by Giles MacDonagh (Phoenix, £14.95 in UK)

Kaiser Bill, as the English called him, has been caricatured both as an imperial ass and as a sinister warlord planning European domination. Neither view is really deserved, but his odd character, at once aggressive and shiftily nervous, made him a hard man to read by the diplomatists and statesmen of the time. He was on bad terms with his English mother and his withered arm gave him a lifelong sense of physical inferiority which often took the form of bluster. Wilhelm was also tactless and a poor ambassador for his country, at a time when Germany above all needed a ruler with a steady head and a well-curbed tongue - both of which he lacked. His role in the outbreak of the Great War is endlessly argued over, but by 1916 he was little more than a figurehead ruler, with Hindenburg and Ludendorff virtually running the show. The long exile at Doorn, in Holland, provides some of the best chapters in a book which seems rather too harsh towards its subject.