Troublesome parents, difficult children, sibling fights – maybe you can get all that at home, but it’s always encouraging to read about the problems of the rich and privileged, which is probably why books about the royals are so enthralling.
You can’t have missed the latest – the volcanic Swan Song by Charles Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales. In the time-honoured way, it has made headline news, with its allegations about the King’s words to Spencer after Diana’s death – “rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough”.
Whatever you make of that book, there are plenty of other royal reads that combine interesting facts and sharp commentary on the family from hell. Here are my 11 best. Dig in and enjoy.
Spare by Prince Harry
The last big book by a royal was Prince Harry’s 2023 memoir Spare. It’s revealing in intended and unintended ways, compulsively readable, and full of oversharing (what we shall euphemistically call his frost injury at the North Pole, his therapy, his drug-taking).
One of the most heartbreaking revelations from Harry is how for a long time he believed that his mother was still alive, and had deliberately disappeared – incidentally the premise of Monica Ali’s 2011 eerie alt-history novel Untold Story, which is also worth reading.
Courtiers by Valentine Low
Low looks at the grey-suited men who assist the royals – but there is nothing grey about the book, which is sparkling, funny and revelatory. Low doesn’t seem to question the system enough – are we really still saying posh people are best because they know what fork to use at dinner? Apparently. But he is an insider – a former royal correspondent – and gets great quotes from the royal aides he speaks to, even if you sometimes want to shake the lot of them.
Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel
The late Wolf Hall author took her scalpel to the royals in a long speech in 2013 at a London Review of Books event at the British Museum. Titled “Royal Bodies”, and generating headlines about the “plastic” Catherine, Princess of Wales, the speech came in for huge amounts of criticism from people – including the prime minister, David Cameron – who plainly hadn’t listened to Mantel’s actual nuanced words. You can read them yourself – and Harry certainly has; he mentions them in Spare – in her Mantel Pieces essay collection.
Entitled by Andrew Lownie
Updated in paperback this year, Lownie’s revelations in this dual biography of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson could have single-handedly finished off Andrew, except that the former prince seems only too willing to do it himself. Entitled is full of eye-opening investigations into the couple’s business affairs and appalling, cringey stories about Prince Un-Charming’s behaviour: amid the rudeness, crude chat-ups and girls brought to hotel rooms, there’s an anecdote by a member of his staff who was obliged to curtsey to him: “He’d stand over you saying ‘LOWER’ and make you repeat the curtsey.” And the great thing about Andrew’s trajectory is that you don’t have to feel sorry for him, not one little bit.
The Palace Papers by Tina Brown
The legendary former magazine editor combines a cool eye with reliable facts on the current royals in her exposé. It’s particularly interesting on William and Kate, who are generally absent from the giant bookcase of royal literature (bar the Mantel speech), and what books there are tend to be effusive, charmless and dull. Brown instead gives us the history of Kate’s determination to marry William, and his grumpiness and lack of decisiveness – but also his endearing love of her family, with that middle-class cosiness his upbringing lacked. The Palace Papers is a top read, bitchy but fair. Follow it with Brown’s The Diana Chronicles, which is still the best biography of Diana out there.
A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown
Brown writes off-beat and funny biographies, but his A Voyage Round the Queen (2024) wasn’t nearly as disrespectful as his book on Princess Margaret, Ma’am Darling, or even his book on the Beatles. What we expect of Brown is outrageousness: this is unexpectedly sensible, but very readable, and as ever his style is to gather odd unexpected stories from different recollections of Elizabeth II. He goes with his trademark short chapters, with nice payoffs about the dogs, the mistrust of the arts, the love of horses – one review called it “biography by crowd-sourcing” – and a lot of jokes.
Charles and Camilla: Portrait of a Love Affair by Gyles Brandreth
First there was a doomed romance, then flat-out adultery, and then an unexpected happy ending – Gyles Brandreth gives the very full lowdown of the Charles and Camilla saga. His detailed parsing of the infamous Camillagate tape – the Tampax one – is hilarious and forensically thorough as he explains every name and place as the conversation makes clear how many of their posh friends are conspiring to cover up their affair and offering places for them to meet. Solid gold.
The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet
Matthew Sweet’s new biography of Barbara Cartland, marvellously titled The Great Dictator, naturally concentrates on the romance novelist’s extraordinary life – but Cartland also became Princess Diana’s step-grandmother, and takes credit/blame for some of Di’s views on love. Diana had read Cartland’s books as a teenager (given to her by her new stepmother, who also sold them in the gift shop at the family’s stately home, Althorp). As the Wales’s marriage unravelled, Sweet says, Cartland’s “customary account of Diana’s romantic teenage reading habits no longer seemed such a good boast”.
“I dare say it is my fault,” she told a journalist. “Diana loved my books and she used to read all my books because they were about love only and not sex.”
Barbara had troubles with her own daughter and freely gave her important advice to all concerned in the Spencer/Windsor goings-on – her main idea was that Charles and Diana should pretend to a reconciliation neither wanted, and live together “on the surface” as a united family. The Royals are not a huge part of the book, but the rest of it is so entertaining that you won’t regret reading it.
A King’s Story by the Duke of Windsor
And now for a few recommendations for books about previous generations of royals. First up is this memoir by The Duke of Windsor, ie Edward the Abdicator. It has been dismissed as not entirely truthful, but – as with Harry’s Spare – it is fascinating to read his version of a unique childhood and life. He may not have been the King of England for very long, but he is King of Feeling Sorry for Himself.
The Duchess of Windsor by Diana Mitford Mosley
Diana Mitford Mosley (awful person, good writer) produced an informative memoir about her friend the Duchess of Windsor, the former Wallis Simpson, who was of course the divorced American socialite for whom Edward of the previous entry abdicated. She really did know her well, unlike most people who wrote about her. Diana, her husband Oswald Mosley, Wallis and Edward all ended up living in exile in Paris and socialising. Nancy Mitford said the four of them sat round complaining about the French and regretting their lost lives, but that is not of course how Diana puts it.
She believed the love affair between Edward and Wallis made up for all, and that the real sadness for Wallis came only when her husband died: “There is nothing to be said for being the one who is left alone.” She tries to be fair, while plainly being Team Windsor, and the book is unexpectedly touching.
Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy
An official biography of Queen Elizabeth II, by historian Anna Keays, will be some years in the writing. But if you worry that an authorised royal book will be anodyne and dull, look at James Pope-Hennessy’s 1959 biography of Queen Mary (Mary of Teck, the wife of George V, grandmother to Queen Elizabeth II). This, honestly, unpromising idea hides a splendid book – it is very entertaining, full of such details as a German Duchess being made pregnant by a footman, and the Kaiser (Wilhelm II) being convinced the man must have hypnotised her. For even more gossip, read the companion volume, The Quest for Queen Mary.
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