In 2020, Craig Brown was struggling to find a subject for his next biography. He wanted to apply his “mosaic” technique, which ditches a traditional chronological narrative for a profile built from reminiscences, lists and other vignettes, as he’d done with his 2020 bestseller, 150 Glimpses of the Beatles. He just needed to find a […]
In 1981, London City Ballet mistress Anne Allan’s phone rang just as she got her toddler to sleep. On the other end of the line was Princess Diana’s lady-in-waiting, who said the newlywed wanted lessons. Allan found the notion so fantastic that she thought a friend must be playing a practical joke. Soon enough, Allan […]
Shortly after acceding to the throne, King Charles found himself at a loss for words. He had picked up the phone at Balmoral Castle to call his eldest son and break the news of Queen Elizabeth’s death, only to be greeted by the residence’s switchboard operator. “He began by saying: ‘Hello, it’s …’” writes journalist […]
In Once A King, archivist and author Jane Marguerite Tippett lived a historian’s dream come true. While researching a different book on King Edward VIII, an unassuming footnote led her to an uncatalogued archive of recorded interviews with his wife, Wallis Simpson, where the Duchess of Windsor answered questions from a man called “Charlie.” […]
We have all ventured opinions on how the upbringing of British royals created the dynamics at play today, from sensitive Charles, wounded by parental formality, to Will and Harry going to McDonald’s with Diana. But what do we really know? That is the question veteran royal journalist Tom Quinn set out to answer in Gilded […]
In the three short years since British journalist Omid Scobie’s Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of A Modern Royal Family made big waves in August 2020, many predicted (or at least hoped for) a less dramatic period for the House of Windsor after the couple’s controversial move to California. Boy, were they […]
Coronation weekend was all about Charles, but there is much we can learn about the new King from the woman who shaped him. The chief message in Gyles Brandreth’s best-selling biography, Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, is that Queen Elizabeth II did not dwell on her past or the constraints of duty; she just got on […]
Palace courtiers – the men in grey suits, as Diana, Princess of Wales, infamously called them – are mostly anonymous, behind-the-scenes string pullers. But they have been much in the news lately, from the dramatizations of The Crown to the claims of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that courtiers were plotting against them and […]
After publishing 35 books about celebrities, political dynasties and the Royal Family, American journalist Christopher Andersen brings us The King: The Life of Charles III just eight weeks after the heir-in-waiting acceded to the throne on Sept. 8, and seven months before his coronation. Andersen, who has been reporting on the Royal Family for 50 […]
There are, in the main, three kinds of royal biographers: the historians who adhere to academic rigour; the hagiographers, who document the minutiae of royal lives with studied deference; and the hacks, who go for the jugular, looking to orchestrate as many gotcha moments and tabloid bombshell reveals as possible. Andrew Morton is in a […]