The global fascination with the royal family is in increasingly inverse proportion to their importance on the world stage. Thanks mostly to unwise decisions made by members of the ‘Firm’ and hangers-on to “cooperate” with more-or-less reliable memoirs, along with endless tabloid coverage, there is more source material than ever about them.
Yet few royal biographies are remotely readable. Even fewer have much of interest to say about the institution of monarchy itself – endlessly seeking to answer the pesky question: “What is it for?” Fewer still benefit from the eye for detail that the best writers have, something that can brightly illuminate the fustiest of narratives.
